A medium-sized book with a hardcover in restrained shades of grey, and title and subtitle determined by the Social Work research thesis upon which it is based. The Introduction explains the author's role in the social work required to meet the increased demand of 4,000 adults seeking information about themselves following the showing in 1995 and 1997 of a series of BBC documentary films entitled Barnardo's Children. There was already a demand of 1,500 a year for such services resulting from progressive National and European legislation supporting Children's Rights in relation to adoption, including the 1989 Children Act, and Freedom of Information, that are reviewed by the author as the background for her research. Her experience from answering demands for information based on review of Barnardo's comprehensive records, and personal interviews at the time of imparting it, suggested motivation for and responses to the enquirers were complex. She recognised the principle of 'starting with where the client is coming from'.
Her aims and objectives included information and couselling about family background, tracing birth parents and siblings, enabling sense to be made of experiences in care by providing information, and to provide counselling on such issues as loss, separation from siblings, sexual abuse, physical abuse, racism, incest, extramarital parentage, and putative fathers. All of these services have been facilitated by increasing degrees of access to personal files.
The author aimed to interview 12-15 people who had seen their records via Barnardo's After Care Section at least one year previously, and to assess the nature and range of their reactions rather than achieve statistical significance. In doing so the importance of the objectives of such counselling become dramatically obvious, as does the range of responses in which she distinguished three groups: those who had been removed in the first year of their life and placed in a 'real family' albeit a foster family, with which they identified and related well, knowing it was not their birth family; those who remained rootless, having been in Barnardo's from an early age and moved from pillar to post, with much unhappiness; and the group that had spent their early childhood with their real family, from which they had then been removed because of neglect or abuse, and subsequently had been brought up in one of the Barnardo institutions, with which they identified and approved of. The findings are substantiated by analysis of the interviews, including assessing the variable impact of receiving their information in terms of disillusionment, gratitude, the desire to pursue roots, albeit with little long-term benefit, and the apparent satisfaction of the current members of the enquirer's family.
In Part 3 of her study, termed 'Themes and Thoughts' the author dwells on the importance of 'roots', the 'need to know', and 'making sense of the past' most particularly to those who experienced no real family substitute at an early stage in their childhood, and also emphasises the intense emotional reaction that may follow the 'unlocking of the past'.
The last chapter, 'Implications for Practice', emphasises the need to keep children fully informed of their circumstances throughout their growing life, be they adopted, fostered, emigrated, or institutionalised, and in the current practice of responding to adults, including the elderly, seeking information upon their past, a situation likely to continue for some years, to do so with full counselling and care within a process that may range from gratification to devastating disillusionment.
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