I had been getting worried over the last couple of days as I was reading the papers and didn't find anything I especially wanted to blog about. Fortunately, the stupidity of those who would be good as saved us all from terminal dullness. Be warned, rant below.
There have been two articles in today's papers showing the sheer stupidity of many bureaucracies and the jobsworths who work in them. The employees/workers in both instances have - to my mind - a clear primary duty: To get people to adopt children and animals. The second duty is to stop bad people adopting, and that is right and proper. The problem is, the definition of 'bad people' seems to include pretty much anybody. The level of suspicion against those who are merely trying to do a charitable act is appalling.
In the children scenario, a nice, middle-class couple (married, stable home etc) were rejected for being white. Now, I can understand that if there were people queuing up to try and adopt, it may be preferable to place black children with black parents simply because there are some racist bigots out there and I suspect black parents will have been more likely to suffer racism themselves and be able to help their adoptive child by passing on the experience. The problem is that there aren't people lining up to adopt, it's not a 'sellers market'. State care is utterly appalling and virtually anything is better than it - except if you're a social worker, it seems, who would prefer that 'a [black] child stay in care than be adopted by a white family'.
Further, whilst a black, asian or chinese child may have life experiences which make them best placed with parents of the same ethnicity - the couple in this article were also not allowed to adopt children who were ethnically Irish.
Now, forgive me if I'm a little crude on this point, but most racism is pretty mindless. Whilst the rest of us accept that there are differences in culture and community between, say, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian communities, most BNP activists simply see 'brown'. Similarly, whilst there are some cultural differences between Ireland and the UK (though I can't think of any at the moment except for the Irish being slightly more Catholic), to the average racist on the street the Irish child is white and therefore won't suffer so much racism so why the heck would they need a family which is ethnically Irish?
With the RSPCA, they are currently preferring to put animals down than let them being adopted by people who say, refuse to keep a cat indoors at night or who do not wish to build a 20 foot high fence around their property in the middle of the forest. What kind of animal charity believes certain death by injection is more loving and charitable than a house where there are children or where there is a slight risk of death on the road?
So, on animals and the RSPCA, here.
On children and the adoption services, here.
There have been two articles in today's papers showing the sheer stupidity of many bureaucracies and the jobsworths who work in them. The employees/workers in both instances have - to my mind - a clear primary duty: To get people to adopt children and animals. The second duty is to stop bad people adopting, and that is right and proper. The problem is, the definition of 'bad people' seems to include pretty much anybody. The level of suspicion against those who are merely trying to do a charitable act is appalling.
In the children scenario, a nice, middle-class couple (married, stable home etc) were rejected for being white. Now, I can understand that if there were people queuing up to try and adopt, it may be preferable to place black children with black parents simply because there are some racist bigots out there and I suspect black parents will have been more likely to suffer racism themselves and be able to help their adoptive child by passing on the experience. The problem is that there aren't people lining up to adopt, it's not a 'sellers market'. State care is utterly appalling and virtually anything is better than it - except if you're a social worker, it seems, who would prefer that 'a [black] child stay in care than be adopted by a white family'.
Further, whilst a black, asian or chinese child may have life experiences which make them best placed with parents of the same ethnicity - the couple in this article were also not allowed to adopt children who were ethnically Irish.
Now, forgive me if I'm a little crude on this point, but most racism is pretty mindless. Whilst the rest of us accept that there are differences in culture and community between, say, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian communities, most BNP activists simply see 'brown'. Similarly, whilst there are some cultural differences between Ireland and the UK (though I can't think of any at the moment except for the Irish being slightly more Catholic), to the average racist on the street the Irish child is white and therefore won't suffer so much racism so why the heck would they need a family which is ethnically Irish?
With the RSPCA, they are currently preferring to put animals down than let them being adopted by people who say, refuse to keep a cat indoors at night or who do not wish to build a 20 foot high fence around their property in the middle of the forest. What kind of animal charity believes certain death by injection is more loving and charitable than a house where there are children or where there is a slight risk of death on the road?
So, on animals and the RSPCA, here.
On children and the adoption services, here.
4 comments:
Despicable if true, but I have such a distrust of the Mail that I need to see it in another publication first before I take it as gospel
I would normally agree with you on the mail, but I've heard the same story (more or less) repeated in other papers too (which would be the Times and the Telegraph, based on my normal read). Given all of the broadsheets have reported on children being taken from their parents on fictional charges of abuse (in the context of 'Family Courts should be more open) - I am far more inclined to believe that they would do this, too.
I can't help feel that if Social Services took this to King Soloman and he ordered the baby be cut in half, they'd sit back and prefer that rather than have the child adopted by people of the wrong race.
Being wary of 'rabbit proof fence' is all well and good, but to fail to see that this is a completely different scenario astounds me.
I wonder what their attitude is on mixed race couples adopting?
If/when me and Jayna have a child, what children will *that* child be allowed to adopt, when he or she is grown up? How many generations of mixing do we need to go through before people realise that this is 21c Britian, not 1950s Alabama and that skin colour doesn't really matter?
I note with irony that the initials of Social Services are SS.
Under the modern system, your child would only be allowed to adopt a half-Indian(?)/half-white child and only then would he be allowed to adopt if his wife was of the same ethnicity also.
Except, I guess SS would class him as 'brown' and therefore he would be perfectly fine to adopt a child because they wouldn't be running the risk of creating a stolen generation.
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