12 - ‘Adoption Aesthetics’

Summary

In 1965, the International Social Service of Great Britain collaborated with the Sociology Department of Bedford College, University of London, to set up the British Adoption Project. The Project's aim was to offer particular support in securing adoption placements for fifty-three children described as ‘born in Britain of Asian, African, West Indian or mixed racial parentage’. The necessity of the Project emerged from a perceived anomaly in adoption practices more widely in post-war Britain: namely, that while such children constituted a minority of infants in care and awaiting adoption, a disproportionate number of ‘coloured’ children, to use the problematic racialising terminology at the time, struggled to be placed in adoptive families. Although official records were rarely kept, Diana Kareh noted in 1970 that:

for every coloured child accepted and placed by a society, at least one other fails to attract adoptive parents. The figures for 1966…show that 445 non-white children were legally adopted throughout the United Kingdom. At the same time a total of 856 children were known by agencies and statutory societies to be in need of adopters.

The incidence of such children in the care system was due to a number of factors. The biggest constituency were mixed-race, placed in care usually by white birth-mothers struggling to cope with the social stigma attached to conceiving a child both illegitimately and with a black partner. Few such women were able to contend with the formidable economic difficulties involved in raising a child as a lone parent remote from the support of partners or family. In such dire social straits, surrendering children seemed the best way of providing a more secure future for them. Other black and mixed-race children were placed in care or with foster-families by parents seeking to cope on modest incomes, but who sought to maintain contact when they could, and hoped one day to bring them back into a family environment – a phenomenon recorded in Isha McKenzie-Mavinga and Thelma Perkins's memoir, In Search of Mr McKenzie: Two Sisters’ Quest for an Unknown Father (1991). Birth-parents who surrendered black and mixed-race children into care were often hard-up migrants, poor working-class couples, or single women, often white, with meagre, if any, means of support.