Forced Adoption: A Hidden Scourge

Perhaps one of the most vocal individuals speaking out against forced adoption these days is Telegraph reporter and columnist Christopher Booker, on the heels of Rebecca LeFort and The Times’ Camilla Cavendish. His weekly forays into this secretive world of corruption, slander and kidnap paint an almost unbelievable picture that is large on events but short on details – which is what makes it so unbelievable. Currently, blanket reporting restrictions prevent him from printing names of not only family members but most of the other players in these sordid affairs, including in most cases, judges. This, unfortunately, does not make good print.

Adoption of orphans and paupers for workhouse labour has been a feature of the Industrial Revolution since day 1. Smaller children were also used to clean chimneys. Occasionally, children would become trapped in chimneys or under heavy machinery in textile mills, where they would be left to die. None but their “owners” missed them, though not very much since there was an inexhaustible supply of replacements.

One of the most successful brokers of children was the Anglican Church. The organisation ran poor houses, where single and destitute mothers would bring themselves and their offspring for food and shelter. It didn’t come for free, however (it wasn’t a charity, you know), hence the mothers had to work to feed their families. As mothers began dying of tuberculosis and other diseases that these days we treat with a shot or a pill, the number of motherless children rose.

Enter Stage Left: “Dr”. Thomas Barnardo

Thomas John Barnardo was born on 4th July 1845  in Dublin, Ireland. As a teen, he decided he wanted to become a Protestant medical missionary in China. He moved to London in order to train to be a doctor. He studied at the London Hospital, but never actually completed the course to earn a doctorate. Although he is known as ‘Doctor’ Barnardo, he never actually qualified as a doctor.

During his time in London, Thomas Barnardo became interested in the lives of the Victorian poor. He was apalled by the number of people living on the streets of London and he witnessed the horrific effects of cholera, unemployment and overcrowding. Barnardo decided to put aside his plans to visit China. He opened his first ‘ragged school’ in 1867, in the East End of London, to educate and care for poor orphans. One of his pupils, a boy called Jim Jarvis, took Barnardo on a walk of the the East End, showing him the sheer number of poor children sleeping rough. Barnardo was so moved by the sight that he decided to do something about it. In 1870, Thomas Barnardo opened a home for boys in Stepney Causeway, providing shelter for orphans and destitute children. A sign hang on the building which said: ‘No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission’. Barnardo also founded the Girls’ Village Home. Located in Barkingside, the ‘village’ consisted of a collection of cottages and was home to 1500 poor girls.

Barnardo continued to open institutions that helped to care for poor children. By his death in 1905 it is estimated that his homes and schools cared for over 8000 children in more than 90 different locations.

Since Barnardo’s death, his Foundation has become the World’s most profitable children’s charity, with its latest retiree, Martin Narey, departing with a golden handshake worth more than £100million. Every penny of this money has been gleaned from innumerable charity shops and revenues from transporting British children – orphans as well as children taken into care – out of the UK to Canada, Australia and New Zealand to languish in communes run by various bodies including the Church, for massive profit, and from the selling of children on websites such as bemyparent.org which is administrated by another adoption agency, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF).

In 2010, I was helping a mother in her fight against forced adoption, when she sent me a photograph – a very professionally done one – of her twins who had been takn by the Local Authority with the stated intention of adopting them out. Their claim-of-record was that the children had been very severely abused and that they had suffered multiple injuries. Such injuries were not evident on the photograph. Out of curiosity, I ran the photograph through an online image match, and immediately hit the bemyparent.org website – the twins had been advertised for adoption, on the website, using the exact same photograph. I had discovered evidence of a Local Authority in the South of England having stolen children under false pretenses, and offered them for sale on a website that makes it stated mission as “brokering the adoption of children between agencies and propsctive adoptive parents”. The description of the twins was even more mind boggling: lively and friendly, “no obvious marks or scarring”(!), may be separated(!). I immediately contacted the mother, who understandably was distraught. I then broke the news to the Telegraph and to Brian Gerrish at the UKColumn newspaper. I had to get the word out that my suspicions about Barnardo’s and the BAAF and the whole family legal system had been borne out.