Adoption & Fostering

The period of consultation on the report of the Adoption Law Review Working Party ends shortly. Deborah Cullen and Jill White look at some of the major changes the report recommends (in alphabetical order) and the implications for practice.

Why is adoption such a popular and powerful theme in fiction? Diana Reich looks at four contemporary novels and asks what creative writers can teach us about the ‘adoption story’.

The twenty-fifth Hilda Lewis Memorial Lecture was delivered by Dr Margaret Lynch at the BAAF Medical Group AGM seminar in October on the theme of ‘Child protection in Europe’. Below we present an edited version of her lecture.

Another contributor to the BAAF Medical Seminar on Child Protection in Europe, Dr Catherine Marneffe, from the University Hospital in Brussels described the pioneering work of the Confidential Doctor Centre — ‘Kind in Nood’.

A family can suffer few more public judgements of social failure than to have a child compulsorily removed from its care. Murray Ryburn records the views and experiences of twelve such families, and considers whether the recommendations of the Adoption Law Review Working Party will ensure that their voices are heard in future.

During 1991, Malcolm Hill spent two and a half months in Canada teaching at the University of Calgary and visiting child welfare agencies and residential establishments. In this article he describes some of the more interesting and innovative developments and comments on some of the significant differences between Canadian and British policy and practice.