Social media – our master or our servant?

I dimly remember being a teenager. It was not a great time. It would have been much worse if I had been adopted and on top of my hormonal struggles to come to terms with my place in the world, I then had to cope with the sudden discovery via Facebook that numerous members of my biological family wanted to get in touch and share their perspective about why I was adopted.

Binoculars courtesy of tunnelarmr on flickr

The human part of me feels compassion for the families who have had to face this; in some cases the fall out from such sudden reintroduction to the birth family has been massive and children have decided to move out of their adopted homes. But the less compassionate, lawyer part of me says ‘good’. Because perhaps now we can kick start more debate about post adoption direct contact. We can’t have a blanket assumption that such contact is either good or bad as each case involves a multiplicity of complicated facts and a variety of different people. Direct contact involves a dynamic relationship between people that changes over time. However, if there is now a serious risk of haphazard and unstructured post adoption contact being facilitated through the medium of social networking sites, we need to decide how we deal with that situation and our decisions should be based on good evidence.

The last 50 years have seen enormous shifts in societal attitudes towards accepting different concepts of ‘family’. Adoption is no longer a mechanism to cover up a shameful indiscretion and to encourage adopted children to vanish without trace into their ‘new’ family. There is recognition of the likely strength of our curiosity about our origins and the pull of the blood tie.

According to the Adoption Information Line, 70% of children adopted are between 1 -4 years. Only a very few are under 1 or over 10. The numbers of children adopted each year have decreased significantly from about 21,000 in 1975 to 5,797 in 1995; a reflection of the increased availability of abortion and the societal shift that no longer stigmatises illegitimacy. Adopted children are very unlikely to be brand new babies, given up by desperate teenage girls, but rather older children who have already suffered or were likely to suffer significant harm from their birth parents. We are thus considering a group of children who had a less than ideal start to life, may suffer difficulties with attachment and may retain memories of the harm done to them. It is likely that these children will find it difficult to cope with sudden and unsupported reintroduction to their birth family.

Research suggests that ‘communicative openness’ in adoptive families – how they think and talk about adoption – is positively linked to ‘structural openness’ – contact with birth family members – but that children’s emotional and behavioural development was not related to either the type of contact they were having with their birth families or the communicative openness of their adoptive parents (see Post-Adoption contact and Openness in Adoptive Parents’ Minds: Consequences for Children’s Development Elsbeth Neil Br JSoc Work (2009) 39).

More research is needed; as Elsbeth Neil recognises ‘finding empirical answers to questions about outcomes of contact after adoption is frustrated by significant methodological challenges …what is meant by contact after adoption? The type, frequency, duration and management of contact all need to be considered, as does the type of birth relative involved.’

Elsbeth Neil urged social workers to remain open minded about the issue of direct post adoption contact, resisting blanket predictions of either help or harm. However, it seems that the prevailing attitude is to assume it shouldn’t happen. Different reasons are given for this and they are compelling; birth parents may try to undermine the placement, the children may have unpleasant memories of the birth family and become upset by contact. Many social workers worry that potential adoptive parents will be ‘put off’ adopting if they also have to manage direct contact with birth parents.

But in practice it is rare to find social work analysis that goes beyond those familiar shibboleths, to consider the particular circumstances of children and birth family currently under scrutiny. Those of us who represent birth parents in care proceedings will be sadly familiar with the ‘party line’ around post adoption contact. It seems that the best we can get is a vague expression of a ‘hope’ that an adoptive family can be found who would be ‘open’ to direct contact but in the majority of cases the industry standard is letter box contact once or twice a year. This is so even in cases involving parents who would not actively attempt to undermine the placement and who had not subjected their children to serious abuse, such as parents with a learning disability whose children were removed on the basis of risk of significant future harm.

see no evil - courtesy of C. Pajunen on flickr

Perhaps we are still left with a residue of those earlier desires to entirely absorb the adopted child into the new family and to protect a sense of entitlement for adoptive parents. After all, it is asking a lot of someone to undertake the arduous task of raising a child (who often is neither grateful for nor welcoming of the parents’ input) without clear recognition of the status of ‘parent’.

Thus, the current purpose of the law appears to be to assume that adoptive families should be left in peace without any direct dealings with the birth family throughout the child’s minority. The child’s need for information can be met by Life Story books, some photographs and possibly a letter once or twice a year. An adopted child and birth families can now enter their details upon the Adoption Contact Register to apply for contact with one another. However the clearly stated purpose of the register is to permit contact only between adults if both want it.

Section 4 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 provides that adoptive parents, children and birth families all have the right to request an assessment of their needs for post adoption contact. A recent study investigated the levels and nature of such support (see Supporting post adoption contact in complex cases – briefing paper June 2010). It found that direct contact happens only in a minority of cases and support for such contact is likely to be organised on a case by case basis rather than via dedicated staff or formal systems. The prevailing attitude of social workers towards direct contact is to focus on controlling risk rather than pro active consideration of how to overcome problems that would affect contact.

The main type of support offered to both adoptive and birth parents was co-ordination and administration of contact, rather than providing emotional or therapeutic support such as work on relationship building. Unsurprisingly, for direct contact to work well it helped to have an element of emotional support together with facilitators who were organised and forward thinking, anticipating challenges and changes rather than simply responding to them. The ‘average’ family used contact support services 12 times over the course of a year and the cost was £999. Unsurprisingly, the cheapest model of support was administered contact averaging £395 per year whilst supervised and facilitated contact averaged at £1,371 per year, but these costs were probably an underestimate.

It would be interesting to develop the study and to have greater consideration of the existing structure of post adoption contact support together with a more rigorous cost/benefit analysis of the different types available. Considering the detailed nature of the assessment and matching process in adoptions, the disruption rate is surprisingly high at about 25%. It is certainly worth investigating whether or not greater structural and communicative openness in adoptions is a protective factor against breakdown.

That investigation becomes even more urgent when considering the inexorable rise of the new social media and the impact this has had on the way information now flows and is disseminated. It seems unlikely that the current rather static and limited framework to post adoption contact, with emphasis on adult control and choice, can survive the challenge posed by Facebook or other similar social networking sites.

Facebook was born in 2004 in Harvard. By the end of that year it had barely reached a million active users in the US and it took until 2007 to acquire a similar number in the UK. Like an extremely effective virus it then spread world wide; to date Facebook has 800 million active users, half of whom log on every day. 350 million of these users access Facebook by a mobile device. Each user has an average of 130 friends (Source: Facebook statistics). This incredible growth far outpaces the ability of the law to react to change. Users of social media have been able to act en masse to undermine legal rulings. Depending on your perspective this is either gloriously empowering or a serious threat to the rule of law.

Not only is it now easier than ever before to track people down due to the extent of our interconnecting networks, once you have made a Facebook friend you can access richly detailed on line information, which is immediately and constantly accessible. You can engage with people in discussing and disseminating this information and for those with vulnerable personalities it can be a dangerous playground.

Those 1-4 year olds adopted in 2004 before anyone outside of Harvard had heard of Facebook will now be aged between 9-12 years and likely to be already embracing social media or just about to. It seems inevitable that the numbers of adopted children involved in on line communication with birth parents can only increase and we need to start thinking about how we deal with this now.

It does not seem remotely realistic to respond to the Facebook issue by moving even further away from a culture of openness about adoption and our origins. Worryingly, anecdotal evidence suggests this may be the response from some Local Authorities.

Human constructs such as social media should be our servants, not our masters. They should exist to make our lives easier and better and to provide us all with opportunities to attain as much self actualisation as is within our capabilities. But this will only work if we understand the nature of what it is we have created, both its possibilities and its limitations. The law is a slow and lumbering beast, out of necessity. It takes time to legislate and to see how legislation works in practice. The new social media by comparison has grown from nothing to world domination in a remarkably short space of time and most people have only a hazy understanding of how it operates.

What we need to do urgently is to review and examine our approach to the whole issue. We need more research about the benefits or otherwise of direct post adoption contact. Where such contact is considered potentially beneficial, we then need to think more about what organisation and support is both affordable and feasible.

I appreciate that many parents may not be able to cope with direct contact, or at least not in the immediate aftermath of the proceedings and may, consciously or not, undermine the adoptive placement. But it is a rare set of care proceedings that involves only a mother or father in isolation from wider family and there needs to be fuller consideration of the role played by other relatives.

Adoptive families must not be undermined or disrespected. Adoptive parents take on a very difficult task and have jumped many hurdles to do so. But we have to do as much as we can to protect children from sudden and potentially harmful exposure to a birth family who may be understandably desperate to make contact and provide their version of history, regardless of the pain this can cause. Those adoptive parents who have welcomed post adoptive contact and found it worked well reported a benefit to the relationship with their child; ‘confirming them in their status as the psychological parent and creating an atmosphere of openness and trust within the family’ (see Supporting post adoption contact in complex cases).

As Carl Rogers put it ‘the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing’.

Young children should not have to cope with a deluge of facts about every horrible detail of the circumstances of their adoption. But they need to understand their general situation and why they couldn’t grow up with their families of origin. We need to find the best way for them. We need to master this situation, not just dance to Facebook’s tune.

Hunger 4 Justice – Nick Langford

I am extremely grateful to Lucy for allowing me to write a guest post on her blog; I hope it will provoke some interesting debate.  We need a debate.

On Sunday 10^th July Matt O’Connor, the founder of Fathers 4 Justice, commenced a hunger strike outside the house of the Prime Minister, David Cameron.  Such an action is clearly a dramatic departure from the style of campaigning normally associated with F4J, featuring middle-aged men in lycra.  This is campaigning of a more serious, sombre character, and O’Connor’s supporters wore dark suits and black ties.

The action was prompted by two factors; the first was Cameron’s failure to honour the commitments made by the Conservatives prior to the Election regarding the family justice system.  The second was Cameron’s Sunday Telegraph article on Father’s Day.

The Conservatives’ pledges – not widely reported but presented to F4J in a meeting with Henry Bellingham, Shadow Minister for the DCA – conformed closely to what F4J had been campaigning for.  They began with moving parental disputes out of the courts and promoting early intervention and mediation through “Australian-style” family hubs, a proposal also made by Sandra Davies of Mischcon de Reya and by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice.

There would be a legal presumption in favour of automatic shared parenting within a context of equal parental responsibility and a new definition of cooperative parenting to ensure parents knew clearly what was expected of them before they entered the courts, denying them the option of prolonged litigation.

Contact orders would be made enforceable and there would be zero-tolerance of excuses, delay and false allegations, including (controversially) the withdrawal of benefits from parents who unreasonably withheld access.

Above all the Conservatives committed themselves to reducing the intolerable cost to the economy caused by family breakdown and prolonged litigation at taxpayers’ expense and to ending the ruinous destruction of children’s aspirations and potential.

What impressed F4J was the clear grasp of the issues Bellingham demonstrated, and the work and research which had manifestly gone on behind the scenes.  He promised an urgent and thorough review of family justice with an interim report in the Autumn of 2010.  In an email to F4J on 3^rd May Nick Clegg gave his backing to this review.

What the Coalition delivered, however, was a continuation of the very restricted review already set in motion by Labour.  As MP John Hemming expressed in an EDM, the panel was “dominated by the family justice establishment” and failed to “challenge the status quo”.  Sir Paul Coleridge told the charity Care it was concerned only with procedure and not with principle; “The law in this field is in desperate need of comprehensive, root and branch overhaul after prospective - i.e. forward looking – review of family policy by a non political grouping.”

The family hubs were reduced to a website and helpline, the promise to remove the requirement for grandparents to apply for leave to make a Section 8 application was dismissed, and the commitment to introduce the presumption that parenting should be shared was rejected.

Though the Report met with approval from lawyers’ groups and social workers, it was universally condemned by parents.  Perhaps its worst failing was its refusal to countenance views – plainly submitted to the panel – with which it did not agree, or to grapple seriously with the arguments presented.  The case against a presumption of shared parenting, for example, was provided in Annex P, presented as the Panel’s conclusion, and set against a background of similar conclusions by other writers.  No argument was advanced for the position taken, and the evidence cited was ruthlessly selected to support a position opposed to shared parenting.

In a meta-analysis of the available evidence Robert Bauserman (2002) found court-ordered joint custody promoted better child adjustment than sole mother custody. He found no evidence that having to adjust to two households harmed any aspect of a child’s wellbeing, and evidence that joint custody could reduce levels of parental conflict over time.  In a survey of over 100 studies Linda Nielson (2010) concluded “the research is abundantly clear on this: only allowing fathers and children to live together 15 or 20 percent of the time is not in most children’s best interests.  Our society and our legal system can – and must – do better than this”. These surveys, and the studies they are based on, were omitted from the Interim Report.

On Father’s Day Cameron wrote, “We need to make Britain a genuinely hostile place for fathers who go AWOL.  It’s high time runaway dads were stigmatised, and the full force of shame was heaped upon them.  They should be looked at like drink drivers, people who are beyond the pale.”

Cameron believes the epidemic of family breakdown and fatherlessness – which no one denies – is driven by irresponsible fathers abandoning their families.  Fathers 4 Justice believe it has been driven by decades of anti-family legislative change and by the family courts themselves.

Following the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks introduced unilateral divorce, the separation of sex and child-bearing from marriage, the legalisation of abortion, the legal equivalence of marriage and cohabitation and the approval of formerly outlawed sexual behaviour such as adultery, homosexuality and even polygamy.  Family life almost ceased to exist, 7 million homeless children, the besprizorniki, roamed the streets, joined gangs and sold themselves for sex.  Society lost its capacity to sustain itself: when crises struck there was no family to turn to for support.

Ideologues are trying the experiment again.  We have the highest rate of youth crime in Europe, the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, an epidemic of abortion.  Unlike Russia we have a welfare state which we expect to pay for it all, but already our welfare bill has exceeded income tax receipts.  The situation is not sustainable.

Cameron’s evasion is criminally irresponsible.  There is no evidence to support his position.  A study of non-resident fathers by Jonathan Bradshaw of York University concluded, “There is no need to enforce parental obligations – they exist and are accepted already.”  They just need to be enabled.  “Financial obligations cannot be imposed.  They have to be negotiated in the context of other issues – contact, property, capital.”  The capacity of fathers to pay more child support is over-estimated; Cameron’s policies are unlikely to extract more money, but they will cause hardship and erode contact.

Fathers 4 Justice spent 3 years doing what people asked.  We did the political dialogue.  We did the talking.  But it is now time to hold David Cameron to account over his comments, and over the promises made last year to reform family law.  We are no longer prepared to live in a country that treats fathers as drink drivers, as cashpoints, that thinks it tolerable to allow children to be separated from a parent.  This demonisation of fathers is as wicked as racism or sexism, and it is more dangerous because it has become acceptable.  And David Cameron is its cheerleader.

O’Connor says, “Perhaps the only way he is going to understand the pain, the misery and the suffering being inflicted on parents separated from their children… is for us to bring the campaign home to him, to his home: from my home to his home, father to father.”

Lucy’s Comments (Familoo)

Ok, let’s get this debate started. Shall I play devil’s advocate?

This is the first I’ve heard of the Bellingham pledges, and I must say I’m surprised that such apparently concrete pledges would be made (and given credence) in the context of the Family Justice Review that by then had already been announced and was creaking into action. Personally, I’d have taken such pledges with a spoonful of salt myself, but then I’m not predisposed to trusting the Tories.

In any event, once in office they endorsed the FJR. It has now reported – on an interim basis – but I am slightly mystified by cries of “Betrayal!” at this juncture. There will be a final report in the autumn. It may reach different conclusions. It’s conclusions may be accepted by the coalition. They may not. Legislation may follow. It may not. But my gut reaction is that it might be a little premature to put the padlock on the O’Connor’s cookie jar: they’ll need all their energy for the several hurdles ahead. I would have focussed on a response to the interim FJR report and a response to whatever final recommendations come out of it. If at that stage the pledges are not honoured then they should complain.

I doubt that the FJR interim report was universally condemned by parents. I am sure that it will have been roundly condemned by some groups of parents, or by some campaigning groups.

I doubt also that the Bolshevik analogy is of much assistance to anyone. I’m no social historian, but the parallels seem limited to me.

I agree that the tendency to demonise fathers is to be decried (and I wrote about that after the unfortunate Father’s Day remarks by the PM). I wonder though at the wisdom of an approach that says in effect – “We’ve behaved like grown-ups for three years and you’ve still not given in to our demands. So now we’re going to play up again.” Engagement in dialogue is only likely to be fruitful if it is entered into wholeheartedly and in good faith – just like mediation between ex partners, it will either fail or produce unfair results unless all parties respect the fact that there is more than one perspective. You’ve got to take part in the process to come out with an agreement (one weakness of mediation though, is that sometimes the bully does gets what s/he wants, and the vulnerable party gives in for a quiet life – is that a paradigm that is either desirable or applicable here?).

I struggle with the idea that the kind of theatrical actions that F4J is now engaging in (albeit more serious on one level, particularly for the O’Connor family) are really evidence of a matured organisation – the lounge suits are a means of dressing up what remains in essence a petulant act of foot stamping. It might now be a law abiding stunt, but I wonder if it will enhance the ability of fathers’ rights groups to achieve political and legal change or drag it backwards. The danger is that it will damage the legitimate political capital that F4J have worked over recent years to acquire.

I’m all for equality of opportunity as far as parenting is concerned. It doesn’t matter to me whether its Mr Mom or Lady Cab Driver. Or a shared arrangement that defies the traditional homemaker / breadwinner paradigm.

However, whilst I’m no historian, I can’t think of any time in history or any culture where the role of primary carer is or has been generally  split equally between both parents. Aside from cultural norms and historical societal organisation into very gendered roles, there remain all sorts of practical and financial reasons why one parent most often carries out the bulk of the care of the children. It’s still most often the mother who performs this role, but there is no reason why it needs to be her as opposed to him.

I pause here to observe that even for topsy turvy families like mine where there is a gender role reversal from the traditional female carer : male breadwinner, it is quite often very hard for both of us to shed our guilt for not providing (him) or not being there to kiss it better (me): gendered expectations about our roles as parents are deeply ingrained in us all whatever our philosophy or intellectual belief. I go out to work: I feel like a bad mother, even though I know better. But there is no reason why the carer has to be the mother. And courts must ensure no prejudice in that respect.

But I want to draw out a distinction between avoiding discrimination in our attitudes to who should provide primary care and the quite distinct proposal that the primary care should be split equally between the two parents on separation. When families are together shared care and equal divisions of time are far from the norm, and I’m not sure why they should be the norm when they aren’t together.

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Fathers seek equality in matters of family justice. Equality to me means that each parent should have equal treatment from the courts, equal status as a parent, equal importance in the life of a child. It’s not a mathematical equation and it can’t be expressed in binary. What is legitimate to ask for is that the court, when faced with applications for residence from two parents, does not make its decision based on prejudice or gender stereotype. What is not legitimate is to prioritise a parent’s desire for recognition or affirmation over what is right for the child in any given case.

The complaint is often made that the overwhelming majority of residence orders are made to mothers, ergo discrimination. Well I don’t agree that this equals discrimination, because I don’t think you can tease out from that that brute fact that, in spite of big changes in society over recent decades, the way in which most families still continue to organise themselves is with mum as main carer, and that when most disputes come to court it is from the starting point that the children are used to being cared for by her. Which is not to say there isn’t discrimination in individual cases, but only that the statistics reflect the general trends in society that persist.

In private law disputes the title and status of ‘primary carer’ can become a much sought after prize, the symbol of victory in the battle for equality. The goal of 50% of a child’s time I think is often a symptom of competitiveness between parents, determined on securing a victory in their own conflict. Parents who count up how many nights a year they have and demand an extra 3 nights per annum to balance it out have really lost the wood for the trees – their kids aren’t counting. They are wondering why daddy / mummy is so angry all the time. The 50:50 approach fundamentally misunderstands the way in which our children see us as important figures in their lives. A breadwinner is no less of a parent than a homemaker / carer. My dad worked hard, he didn’t get home to put us to bed often and the patterns and nature of my relationship with him as a child was very different from that I had with my mother. But my parents are equally important to me, regardless of who bandaged my knee or made my sandwiches or who stumped up the pocket money. It is only adults who need to quantify their relationships in hours. Insistence on shared residence can be to impose the judgment of Solomon on children, if not tearing them limb from limb forcing them to be constantly moving from pillar to post in order to share themselves equally between their parents.

Shared parenting works well for some. Equal splits of time also for some. There are any number of combinations or arrangements. But, when there are two homes the practical and geographical problems can often make shared care stressful or impractical. For the bulk of families, whether separated or together the only practical solution is to take different but equal roles. Children understand that in their own way and think no less of us for it. Sometimes I think that the more parents try to demonstrate their equality through carving up the weeks into 50:50 shares, the more they force children to choose between them.

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I know that fathers rights / equality campaigners don’t think that the welfare checklist / best interests test achieves a non-discriminatory result, but I think a presumption of shared care would subjugate the welfare of the child to the straitjacket of dogma. But what if instead we were to legislate to remove any perceived discrimination by identifying what is impermissible for the court to take into account: a codification of the principle of non-discrimination by, say, a provision that the court must not make decisions about the care or residence of a child on grounds of gender.

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These are just my Friday night musings and I’ve had half a glass of wine (baby related abstinence means even this results in mild squiffiness). But I do think there are more creative ways to think about how we promote equality for mums and dads and I think that the debate about this needs to be both more rigorous and more innovative.

He’s right on the nail there as far as I can see. But I don’t see the other two parties as being exactly a family lawyer’s dream party either, so this won’t change my vote.

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The Lib Dems will also incorporate the UN Convention on the rights of a child into UK law, publish anonymised Serious Case Reviews and they make a number of generalised pledges about such things as the reduction of child poverty.

Thanks AC for the heads up.

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There is an interesting and thoughtful piece in The Times today about just this issue: how blended and stepfamilies manage the minefield of Christmas. Christmas is a recipe for fallings out at the best of times but it can be a really tough time for those who are separated or divorced, and for their kids and their wider families.

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Dr Weir reported that of the children he assessed, all of whom were children expressing resistence to contact at the outset, most were able to resume contact once an observed contact was insisted upon. Contact was successfully reestablished and continued in the majority of cases. Factors affecting the likely success of contact leading on from such an assessed contact were neutral handover without the resident parent present (e.g. collect from school), the age of the child (although successful outcomes were achieved with all age groups success with over 7s was more unpredictable), and the length of the preceding period of no contact (the shorter the better). What was apparent from the material presented by Dr Weir was that:

1. delay in these cases is likely to be harmful and to reduce the chances of a successful outcome (this is not news but the correlation was quite starkly apparent from the figures)
2. wishes and feelings reports may lead us to abandon attempts to re-establish contact prematurely
3. whilst for some children it is important to enable them to feel they have a voice, it is important to be aware that children need protection from the burden of having to express a preference for one or other parent or from having to take responsibility for such difficult decisions

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There are 40,000 contact applications issued in England & Wales each year. Delay is endemic. The President’s Interim Guidance actively encourages the use of short wishes and feelings reports as a first port of call in order to reduce the burden on an overstretched CAFCASS. These reports have their place of course, and many contact cases are far less entrenched or highly conflicted than the types of cases Dr Weir is involved with. But all cases start out the same way and most follow a pretty predictable route through in court conciliation, review hearings, wishes and feelings reports – trying this and trying that, softly softly…before months have turned into years and someone somewhere realises this has become a High Conflict Contact Dispute and BANG: you wish with hindsight you had grabbed the bull by the horns earlier on and got an expert in. If Dr Weir is right we’re going about it all wrong. And the current cheap and cheerful wishes and feelings reports may be storing up problems for further down the road.

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One of the topics not addressed by Dr Weir is that the LSC will now not fund any assessment of contact in private law cases and so Dr Weir’s own working practice of insisting that an assessed contact is an integral part of the assessment may no longer be achievable.

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Dr Weir’s paper on this topic has been submitted for peer review. If and when I hear of its publication I will post a link or reference.