By guest blogger Nicole DuRoche.
“Adoption in the child welfare system — A cross-country analysis of child welfare workers’ recommendations for or against adoption” was written by Marit Skivenes and Øyvind Samnøy Tefre of Bergen University College of Norway’s Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, and was published in Children and Youth Services Review on July 30th, 2012. The article summarizes a survey of 301 child welfare workers from England, United States (California), and Norway concerning their stance on one particular fictional adoption-related vignette. Specifically, workers were asked whether or not they would allow a child to be adopted by his foster parents, to provide a rationale for their response, and then to explain what would have to be different in order for them to change their decision.
In the vignette, a three-year-old boy ‘Benjamin’ has been with the same set of foster parents since the age of five months, and they now want to adopt him. Benjamin was placed with the foster parents after having been removed from his biological parents due to physical abuse and parents’ drug use. Since his removal, the parents have not been attending visitations with the child, and they continue to use drugs. The main complication is that the biological mother does not consent to the foster parents adopting Benjamin (the reason behind her lack of consent is unspecified). The father would consent to the adoption as long as he could retain his visitation rights.
Results from the survey show several differences in attitudes and priorities among each country’s child protection workers. A strength of the article is that it outlines each country’s adoption-related policies, as well as a general description of how their child and family welfare/protection system operates, which provides context for understanding the workers’ decisions and rationales. Analysis and discussion of workers’ responses and rationales is thorough, the study was peer-reviewed by the Norwegian Research Council, and was also assessed for ethical concerns by separate entities in England and Norway. However, the authors acknowledge that the sample size from each country is not sufficiently large enough to be considered representative of the general population of workers in that country.
This study presents several different lenses through which to understand reasons for and against forced adoptions in child welfare. Legislation in the U.S. includes a rigid timeline for achieving permanency, while England’s legislation provides a loose set of deadlines for reaching permanency, and Norway has no stated timeline or deadlines in their adoption legislation. Consequently, the vast majority of workers in California and England would recommend adoption. However, 41% of Norwegian workers would not recommend adoption, mainly because of the biological mother’s lack of consent. Most workers in all countries cited both ‘parental behavior’ and ‘permanency’ as reasons for adoption, but Norwegian workers also placed high emphasis on Benjamin’s attachment with the foster parents, more so than did workers in England and California. Another key difference was U.S. workers generally placed less importance on child’s needs than did both Norwegian and English workers.
Reference: Skivenes, M., & Tefre, O.S. (2012). Adoption in the child welfare system — a cross-country analysis of child welfare workers’ recommendations for or against adoption. Children and Youth Services Review, 34(11), 2220-2228. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezp3.lib.umn.edu/science/article/pii/S0190740912002873