Introducing Adult Adoptee Movement

Thanks to Claire and How To Be Adopted for inviting us to introduce ourselves here. We are baby scoop era adoptees living in the UK, who came together in May 2022 during the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) parliamentary inquiry into historic forced adoptions. We aim to raise adoptee voices and campaign on issues that affect adult adoptees, in order to change the narrative and to improve things not only for us but for younger adoptees too. We believe that at our stage in life we have a perspective on adoption that we did not have when we were younger and that our lived experience and insights can inform policy makers and service providers. Adult adoptees are rarely part of the conversation and we want to change that.

Our first task was to write a response to the JCHR report, which we published in October 2022. We are still (as of February 2023) waiting for the government’s response to the Committee report, which was due in September 2022. We have had an email reply from the Department for Education but it echoes the evidence given to the Committee by then-Secretary of State Nadhim Zahawi, and it does not sound like the government will take responsibility for the state’s role in forced adoptions and issue an apology. We are asking for a lot more than an apology and you can read our full response on our website.

One of our recommendations was to remove the requirement for those providing counselling and therapy to adult adoptees to be registered with Ofsted. The government is now consulting on this change in England and you can respond to the consultation up to 20 March 2023. We will be responding as a group and we will make our response public. We support the proposal but have concerns about what unregulated services will look like, and about how we will actually get the help we need.

If you would like to learn more you can visit our website where you will find profiles of our founding members, links to our response to the report, some resources and a series of blogs we have written. You can also follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter. If you are an adoptee and would like to join our Facebook support group you can find it here.

We love the work that HTBA does and will continue to advocate for adoptee-led services and organisations to be at the centre of any support for adoptees.

Adult Adoptee Movement, 
February 2023