Facebook & Adoption
June 29th, 2010 | by Jen |Adoption is undergoing a revolution. Until recently, it has been a closely managed process, with social workers going to enormous lengths to protect children placed with adoptive families from inappropriate contact with birth relatives. The exponential growth of social networking sites such as Facebook has changed that forever - and the consequences are far-reaching.
Last month, a collective shiver ran through the homes of adoptive parents in Britain after a flurry of newspaper and television reports about birth parents using social networking sites to make unsolicited approaches to children who, years earlier, had been removed and adopted.
”Children tracing their birth families has been the most prevalent - we have had dozens of cases [here],” says Joan Hunt, an adoption social worker for North Yorkshire county council, in the north of England. Every week she hears from adoptive parents who phone up in panic, having discovered that their adopted child has been having secret contact with birth relatives.
”It obviously has big repercussions for everyone involved. What I find heartbreaking is that children are seeking out their birth family and meeting them with no support from those who are closest to them. Equally, birth family members are meeting children without the support that should be in place for them.”
Today’s adopted teens are the first to have grown up with Facebook - and at the time of the adoptions, no one could have predicted it would be possible. By making it easy to find people, social networking sites have blown apart all the carefully thought-out procedures for tracing and reunion in adoption.
There may be a honeymoon period when the young person is thrilled to have found their birth family and believes they are the answer to all their problems, but it rarely lasts. Sometimes the relative passes on the young person’s details to other family members, who also start phoning and sending messages, making them feel bombarded and pressurised. Young people may discover upsetting facts, be told a misleading version of events, or find that the contact stirs up memories of earlier abuse. And if they haven’t told anyone, they have to go through any resulting confusion, anger, distress, rejection or disappointment without support.
Katie Smith was six months old when she was placed for adoption by her birth parents. At 14, she secretly made contact with her birth family on the internet. She was excited at first but the contact with her birth father and one of her older birth sisters has turned out to be the opposite of what she had hoped.
”My birth sister used to email me every morning, saying I was dirt and I should die,” she says. ”Once, my birth father said to me on the phone: ‘I know everything that’s going on in your life. I’ve got Facebook right here in front of me’, and he started reading out things from my mum’s profile too. And they have tried to manipulate me, making me believe things that aren’t true.”
It was three months before her parents found out what had happened. Katie’s birth father has been imprisoned at least twice for violence and drug-related offences, and, not surprisingly, Katie’s mother, Lorna, was alarmed. ”We didn’t know if they would turn up here or what they might do to us. We were in a state of panic,” she says.
Katie has struggled with the impact of two years of damaging contact. Her adoptive family has had to come to terms with what has happened.
The social networking revolution has raised pressing questions for everyone involved in, or touched by, adoption. Some social workers are wondering whether it will fundamentally change the nature of adoption.
In some cases, meeting birth parents can be helpful for a young person and enable him to accept the reality of his birth family and move on.
An alternative is for adoptive parents to get involved and help their children find answers to their questions. It helps if they can show their children that they are open to talking about the adoption - that way, if the child needs to know more or if they are contacted by a birth relative, they may be more likely to tell them.