Once a child has left care, their characteristics, the stability of their placement and how they left it influence their chances of re-entering the system.
Long-term stable foster placements can achieve similar outcomes to permanent care placements.
Shutterstock
Victorian child protection law reforms due to come into effect next month will give parents two years from when their children are removed to lift their game, before permanently losing custody.
Cutting all links between a child and its family should be the very last option.
vlavetal/www.shutterstock.com
Michelle Grattan speaks with Social Services Minister Christian Porter about the government's moves on domestic violence, his thinking on welfare reform and his support for making adoption easier.
‘Millions of children in overseas orphanages … would dearly love to have parents’, claims Tony Abbott, and his government is making intercountry adoption easier.
Screenshot/Intercountry Adoption Australia
Most of the world’s ‘orphans’ are not orphans at all and many are caught up in a global trade in meeting demand for adoption. Making intercountry adoption easier adds to the risks for these children.
Adoption should only be considered when other, less intrusive options, have been eliminated.
Pavel L Photo and Video/Shutterstock
In response to the tragic death of four-year-old Chloe Valentine in South Australia, adoption has been raised as a solution to a “child protection crisis”.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, pictured meeting adoption advocates, has largely ignored expert practitioners and researchers in developing his new policy.
AAP/Alan Porritt
On Sunday, January 25, Prime Minister Tony Abbott released a little more detail about his plans for adoption in Australia. Although specifics are still pretty thin on the ground, the announcement makes…
How much Chinese will these adopted babies remember?
Adrian Bradshaw
How robust are languages learned in childhood but disused later in life? A new study by researchers at McGill University and the University of Montreal has found that the forgotten birth language of adoptees…
Happy families - but only 6,000 of 92,000 children in care were adopted last year.
Shutterstock
National Adoption Week is upon us and we are again being asked to consider becoming adoptive parents to a child in care. In the past four years the week to recruit adopters has quadrupled, leading to a…
Foster carers can have a powerful impact on the lives of vulnerable children and young people. But with an average of four moves for each child in foster care, living with instability can affect them into…
Tony Abbott has been very responsive to high-profile adoption campaigners but a deregulated, consumer-driven system increases the risks for children.
AAP/Jane Dempster
It’s not just refugees being sent overseas. Prime minister Tony Abbott is prepared to hand over Australia’s obligations towards children to countries that are not party to the 1993 Hague Convention on…
In a recent BBC documentary, celebrity chef and former model Lorraine Pascale reflected on her turbulent experience of growing up as an adopted child; a period interspersed with time spent in foster care…
In a reminder of the risk of adoption rackets, these Nepalese orphans were rescued from a home that was profiting from supplying them for domestic work and overseas adoption.
EPA/Narendra Shrestha
Prime minister Tony Abbott has released the Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Intercountry Adoption and announced changes to “enable more people to find families”, not meet children’s needs…
Problems arise when adoption becomes the goal to be achieved at all costs.
Image from shutterstock.com
Adopting a child can be a difficult and time-consuming process, with few opportunities for local adoptions. The number of adoptions in Australia has declined steadily since the 1970s, with just 45 local…
Forced adoption mother Linda Miles poses with a photograph of herself, pregnant at the age of 18 years old.
AAP/Paul Miller
Today in the Great Hall of Parliament House, prime minister Julia Gillard will apologise to those affected by past forced adoption practices. This is the third national apology delivered in recent years…
We may have to apologise for intercountry adoptions in future, just as Victoria has apologised to the children of forced adoption mothers here.
AAP/Paul Jeffers
You might not have realised it, but it is Adoption Awareness Week. Every year at this time lobbyists pull out the big gun – the celebrity card - and Deborra-Lee Furness hits the airwaves. The messages…