FILE ON 4 INVESTIGATES: Do modern day forced adoptions exist and if so, how do they happen? TUESDAY 6 OCTOBER 8pm & on BBC Sounds
Over 90% of adoptions in the UK are without parental consent, among the highest in the world. Support Not Separation and the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign are calling for an end to this most brutal and draconian abuse of power by the State, which denies children’s right to their family and mothers’ right to their children.
Following an earlier Fileon4 investigation, Adoption: the blame game (December 2025), we wrote to them pointing out that forced adoptions were not just “historic” and “to draw attention to the issues that lead to children being adopted in the first place . . .”. We invited them to get in touch. The 6 October broadcast is a result of the work we have done with the BBC over the past six months, putting them in touch with birth mothers whose children were forcibly adopted and with adoptees. The programme includes compelling interviews with those directly affected, as well as ourselves.
To coincide with File on 4’s broadcast, we are compiling a Dossier, After the Apology: the movement to stop today’s forced adoptions. It includes testimonies from nine birth mothers, two grandmothers and two adult adoptees. Publication date tbc.
A mother whose child was adopted (and one taken into care) after she was a victim of domestic violence says: “Social services’ manipulation of facts, rather than any support, has ruined my and my children’s lives, there’s no getting back the years that we’ve lost together, all the things we could have done together.”
An adult adoptee says: “I felt more like a pet than a person. I was something to show off, I was proof of how good [the adopters] were. 18 years of being unwanted and unloved and then it turns out my mum has wanted me this whole time and absolutely would have taken me back”.
Of the hundreds of mothers SNS has worked with since we started in 2017, approximately 10% had children adopted without their consent. The mothers in our Dossier are typical of the many mothers who find themselves up against the State, and/or abusive men backed by the State, in front of social workers and judges who, instead of protecting them, take their children from them. Over half these mothers have been victims of domestic violence, who received no help. Instead, they were accused of “failing to protect” their children and exposing them to “possible future emotional harm” despite no actual harm having been caused. Two mothers are physically disabled; two have autism, one is learning disabled and others have mental health issues; two are care leavers; and five are mothers of disabled children, which automatically brought them to the attention of social services. All have been deeply traumatised by losing their much loved children to the State despite their monumental efforts to keep them. The two adult adoptees describe childhoods dominated by sexual, physical and emotional abuse by their adopters, growing up in deeply hostile environments.
Anne Neale from SNS says:
All adoptions without parental consent must be stopped. If mothers who are disabled, young and/or care leavers or fleeing domestic violence got the support they are entitled to, many fewer children would be in “care” and many fewer would be adopted. And if resources now directed at removing children were put into keeping families together, mothers would be able to keep children safe. Adoption is supposed to be a last resort, but it’s often social workers’ preferred option – that is not the law, it’s an abuse of the law by agents of the state. Also, children who really cannot stay in their birth families, should be placed with kinship carers not strangers – and given the same resources as foster carers.
