The challenge by a paediatric nurse to the Children’s Authority over the adoption of a six-year-old child is a reminder of the scrappy circumstances facing orphans and children in need of care.
In a second hearing of the case, after the Privy Council refused the authority’s move to dismiss it, the nurse pursued the process on principle; she dropped her attempt at adoption after someone else adopted the child in 2019.
She had cared for the child for 18 months after he or she was abandoned in hospital at birth.
Dismissing her case, Justice Devindra Rampersad notably made no order for the nurse to pay the authority’s legal costs, finding much for concern in its handling of her adoption application.
Compellingly, Justice Rampersad noted that the authority chose to let the slow wheels of law grind on instead of moving proactively in the child’s best interests.
It was not a good look for the Children’s Authority to be described by a judge as acting with “sheer, almost contemptuous disdain” in handling the application.
That this decision was handed down in November, globally acknowledged as Adoption Awareness Month, should salt the wound of the judge’s opinion of the authority’s adamantly wrong-headed management of a sensitive adoption case. It’s particularly egregious given the authority’s stated role: “To listen and respond to the needs of children and parents.”
The Children’s Authority replaced the Adoption Board as part of its mandate to protect and care for at-risk children in 2015.
Between 2015 and 2022, just 83 children have been adopted, with 200 applications described as being in processing. The pool of children available for adoption remains small.
There are also 700 children in state care in 40 children’s homes who cannot be adopted, since their parents have not relinquished their responsibilities. Many have parents who are unable to care for them, or were removed from unsuitable homes by the court.
In May, Minister in the OPM Ayanna Webster-Roy indicated it is the government’s preference that children should be placed with foster families instead of children’s homes.
Foster care wasn’t even formally recognised as an option for children in state custody before 2015.
The authority has put an emphasis on temporary foster care since 2020, but the support payment per child remains small, at $1,500 a month. The process is not widely understood, and there is no system for preparing prospective foster parents for their role.
The Children’s Authority must do more than simply say it is acting in the best interests of children.
Its approach in the nurse’s adoption case is amplified in its apparent inability to increase the chances of the hundreds of children in state custody of finding a loving home.
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