On child abuse in adoptive families: Apart from the legal perspective and on a more emotional level, it is very hard to face the fact that people who deliberately chose to parent children, after a long process of waiting and of showing great effort, will be capable of abusing this very child.It is just as unbelievable that often, denial of the family and friends is the only consequence when mistreatment and abuse take place.
As is often the way with abuse of children, particularly when the abuse is sexual abuse which also constitutes psychological abuse. So often in cases where there is denial by the adults involved, the child is further abused by that denial and lack of acknowledgement of their abuse and it's effects. Children need to be believed, taken seriously and their future protection and support taken seriously.So often adults are at a loss to know what to do, how to do it and think only of some of the implications for the adults involved. Children do not forget and are scarred,usually for life, not only by the abuse but by those who deny them belief and protection. The indicators of abuse are very clear and should always be taken seriously. No parent can parent effectively if they do not know what these are, what to look for and what to do about it if abuse is suspected. Parents need to teach children what is inapproprite and how to keep themselves safe. Any parent who does not is negligent. Much abuse is perpetrated by family relatives or friends, regularly by siblings and of course by parents themselves. All adults can help protect children by being vigilant, refusing to believe it is wrong to interfere when a child's safety is at stake and not turning away.
There seems to be no limit to the abuses adults heap on innocent children without remorse and often making justification.That denial and lack of remorse is often one of the clearest indicators of guilt. Innocent until proven guilty? In the law perhaps, but those with experience of working with perpetrators understand the sociopathology and act on it to protect children from further abuse.There was a time when it was possible to measure what a child said about the experience of abuse against what would be the usual knowledge of a child of that age. If there was not a fit, then the suspiscion of abuse was strengthened. These days the lines are a bit more blurry since pornography is freely available and children are sexualised deliberately and acquire explicit information earlier and earlier. Nevertheless children do not generally make accusations of sexual abuse if there has been none.There are exceptions, but they are known in specific situations and usually for certain age groups.
People who become adopters who abuse adoptees fall into several groups, maybe more. Those who adopt in order to abuse the adoptee/s and have made their way through the system not necessarily because they are able to hide their abusiveness but because the system allows for mistakes of this sort, in fact caters more than adequately for it by poor, inefficient home studies, lack of regulation, scarcity of ethics and inability to separate money from what is best for adoptees.There are others who are badly let down by their agency for the same reasons plus lack of correct information about the adoptee who is badly and often fatally placed.The stresses of trying to provide a suitable placement for a child who may need very specialised care or is unadoptable may uncover tendencies and lack of skills in the adopters they were unaware of or which take them by surprise. When there is a lack of support and effective monitoring things can go very wrong very quickly. These days we know so much about the abuse of children there is no excuse for allowing ti to happen where it can be prevented.
Von this is a very deep post. Thank you for writing this and covering a topic that gets overlooked most of the time. This is something that people do not like to talk about. You are right when you said that if parents were able to point out when their child's behavior changes they then would be able to recognize that something is not right. Parents lose focus on the children at record numbers as the economy flip flops and parents have to work more, or even worse turn to alcohol or abuse to cope with the depression from the economy. I could go on with that. Here in Florida we see so many cases where foster care kids get lost in the system and found dead or abused and adoptive parents abuse and kill their children as well. They slip through the cracks as social workers say. When I studied human services in college we heard all of the reasons why social workers cannot do their ob effectively due to the number of cases....blah blah blah. We cannot blame them, but the system needs some quick intervention. They need to be held accountable. Now with the privatization of once state run facilities who knows what will happen. However, when I spoke at a conference in Seattle for adoptees and fostered alum I met social workers that in fact cared about their job (they were adoptees) and were reluctant more often than not to not allow adoption to take place. They did a heavy amount of investigation on families because they knew what people like us have been through.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Von!
Thanks Muzik, I value your opinion so much.All the SW's I know and have known, care deeply about their jobs and what they do,also about what the law permits them to do and what the rules are they have to abide by.Sometimes their hands are tied, they could do so much more of benefit to children if the system worked with them.Often they give biological parents every support and opportunity to set things right but those opportunities are not taken up.
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