Adoption in the time of coronavirus: How Covid-19 is causing delays and a spike in violence

While some parents wait in frustration, others are left struggling to cope without access to support, finds Helen Coffey

There’s been a decline in adoption despite more children coming into care (i)

“I just fell in love with her as soon as I held her. Everything about her was beautiful.”

Ella* can’t keep the emotion out of her voice as she recounts the first time she met Sophie*, the one-year-old girl she and her wife Phoebe* are in the process of adopting. It was back in February 2020, not long before the severity of the coronavirus outbreak started to become apparent, at an open-day event for prospective adoptive parents. The couple went along just to see what it would be like; they weren’t actually expecting to find a new addition to their family.

“We went in thinking, ‘this is weird, we’re just going to use it as a test’ – but it was an incredible way to meet our child,” says Ella. “It was so much better than just going through kids’ profiles.”

One reason for that is that Sophie has a mild disability. Reading about it on her profile, before they’d seen her in the flesh, Phoebe had some concerns – but they were all swept away when she saw Sophie in her wife’s arms. “I called Phoebe over, and when she looked at us, she immediately saw that I was holding my daughter,” says Ella. “We fell totally in love.”

It seems like a lifetime ago now, particularly the idea that it was acceptable for tens of adults and children to be bundled into a room together. It wouldn’t be long after that day that new social distancing rules would come into play, resulting in all adoption events being cancelled. It’s just one of the myriad ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown have had an impact on adoption in the UK.

Although agencies are trying to keep the process moving forward as much as possible for hundreds of adoptive parents up and down the country, delays are inevitable. For Ella and Phoebe, things are complicated further by the fact that Phoebe is in one of the coronavirus high-risk groups, forced to completely self-isolate. This will present particular challenges when the time comes for Sophie’s transition to her new home – the entire foster family she’s currently living with will have to self-isolate for 14 days beforehand, to absolutely ensure Sophie isn’t infected with Covid-19 when she makes the move.

It feels like our daughter is living somewhere else

No date has been set for the handover yet; there’s no way of knowing what the landscape will look like in a few months’ time. “It’s frustrating,” says Ella. “Life feels like a big bubble of uncertainty right now. Normally with an adoption, you’d be able to plan months in advance. Now it’s complicated and up in the air. What’s hard is that she feels like our daughter – and so it feels like our daughter is living somewhere else when she should be here.”

Ella and Phoebe are some of the lucky ones, relatively speaking. In their local area, social workers are still pushing for adoptions to go ahead, and are organising interview panels over video chat where face-to-face meetings would otherwise have been the norm. Elsewhere, some stretched local authorities have had to move most social workers to frontline child protection cases, meaning adoptions have to be put on the back burner.

“The current lockdown situation has impacted adoption, all families and children will be impacted and will suffer delays,” says voluntary adoption agency Adoption Matters. “We are aware that some matches and linking of children may have been delayed due to various reasons but as we enter the fourth week things are starting to slow down as courts are not hearing adoption cases and virtual links and panels are slowing down across local authorities. Families where the adoptive parents are in the coronavirus vulnerable group, or likewise the adoptive children, will almost definitely face longer delays.”

Finding new potential adopters is also an issue for some agencies at a time when it feels like everything has ground to a halt. “We know that the impact of coronavirus is placing even more pressure on vulnerable families across the UK, and this may well result in a rise in children needing adoption,” Barnardo’s chief executive Javed Khan tells The Independent. “We need individuals and couples to help us meet this challenge and urge anyone who is considering becoming an adopter to get in touch.”

Even before coronavirus hit, adoptions were on the decline. According to figures released by the Department for Education in December 2019, the number of adoptions in England had fallen by a third in the past four years, despite increasing numbers of children being put into care. In the previous year alone, the number of children in care being adopted had dropped by 7 per cent. While it’s hard to say definitively why adoptions have decreased, one theory is that improved IVF success rates mean more people who previously would have adopted are having their own children.

My head planted shame, took my confidence from underneath me and terrible thoughts crept in

Adoption charity Adoption UK’s chief executive, Sue Armstrong Brown, said at the time: “There is no right number of adoptions. However, the decline in recent years, despite the number of children coming into care increasing, has been a cause for concern for all. We urgently need to see improvements in the way adopters are recruited, trained and supported to ensure these vulnerable children find the loving, stable homes they deserve.”

But now that support is even more limited, a worrying issue has arisen: there’s been a spike in child to parent violence, anecdotally at least, according to Adoption UK. “Around three-quarters of adoptive parents experience violence or aggression from their child, and we have heard instances of this escalating during lockdown,” a spokesperson tells The Independent.

A recent survey of its database found that 53 per cent of adoptive parents are experiencing an increase in challenging behaviour, while 31 per cent reported experiencing an increase in violent and aggressive behaviour. One adoptive parent, Theresa, hadn’t experienced violence from her adoptive daughter for some time after years of therapy and therapeutic parenting. Since the lockdown began, her daughter has started to threaten violence again, as well as becoming withdrawn and starting to self-harm.

Part of the problem is that the support structures that are usually in place have been pulled out from underneath adoptive families. Support networks have disappeared, face-to-face therapy sessions have stopped, social worker visits have been axed with input only available over the phone, and even the respite offered by schools is largely gone. Some parents have said that therapy sessions in particular were life-saving support – the difference between an adoption working or breaking down. Without it, families are struggling.

For those who adopted just before the lockdown, the transition has been particularly hard. Vicki, a new adoptive mum from the Midlands, was only nine weeks into the adoption when lockdown hit. Faced with the realisation that they would be totally reliant on each other, both mother and daughter mourned the loss of their regular networks.

“I found it incredibly difficult to talk to anyone about how I felt,” said Vicki. “My head planted shame, took my confidence from underneath me and terrible thoughts crept in.” It came close to placement disruption, the term used for when an adoption doesn’t work out. But finding support from Adoption UK and a community of other adoptive parents helped her stay the course.

There is now light at the end of the tunnel for her and her five-year-old daughter. “If things go as they’re suggesting and we start to come out after 12 weeks of isolation, we will have been in this strange period for almost as long as we have known each other as mummy and daughter,” she says. “If I can hold on through this, I can face anything that comes our way, surely?”

Anyone affected by any of the issues raised should contact Adoption UK’s helpline, for free and confidential peer-to-peer advice on 0300 666 0006 / helpline@adoptionuk.org.uk

*Names have been changed