Are you my real mum and dad?

60 out of  3660 children in care were adopted last year according to Cameron.
This issue bugs me, I know this figure wont break it down into those in permanent care, those in temporary care, those with cultural issues when trying to place them etc but still, 60 from 3660 is less than 2%. A fair bit less. It’s a shocking statistic.
Its baffling when you think of the amount of good people out there who no matter how much they’ve spent on expensive IVF simply cannot have children. People that would clearly make fantastic parents that for whatever reason get turned down when trying to adopt.
I read examples frequently of people who have been rejected for being too old, from the wrong cultural background, the wrong sexual orientation and even because their BMI was too high. I appreciate there has to be guidelines and boundaries when placing children but over 98% of kids in care staying in care just isn’t good enough.
There are fantastic people that work in care and they do their very best with often limited resources to bring as much normality as they can to the lives of children they look after but nothing can replace having a good, loving, supportive family.
This brings me on to another thing that bugs me, decent people in solid relationships and decent jobs spend thousands of pounds and years of their lives trying to have children through expensive IVF treatments and sadly never get lucky yet so many people I come across in my job who survive on a diet of tenants super strength lager, ready meals and amphetamine seem to have enough kids to fill a crèche. Where is the justice in that?
Around a 18 months ago my colleague and I were sent to an address on a street well known to us for the delights that live there. Social services were there to do an assessment on the living conditions as there were five children (one mother, five fathers) who were all on the child protection register. Social services were worried about the reception they’d get so we were supposed to be sent to avoid any breach of the peace. What we witnessed was nothing short of a disgrace. Not much surprises me in this job anymore but I was left astounded by what we saw.
The living room was a tip, I expect that sadly but try not to judge people by the standards of my OCD girlfriend but on closer inspection it was worse than a bit of mess. The staffy bull bitch was clearly in season and was dripping blood over the same floor that there was a baby crawling about on. There was faeces smeared on the walls. Food had been left on plates in the corner of the room for what must have been at least two weeks. The beading around the naff laminate floor had come away from the walls leaving sharp edges pointing out at the eye line of the crawling baby.
We moved into the ‘dining room’. The door was off the hinges that it was now crudely propped up against. Faeces were again smeared across the wall, to this day I do not know if they were from a human or the dog, sadly I believe it was likely to be the former. There was pools of urine on the floor under the dining table, again I am unsure of the source. There was a broken piece of glass in the corner of the room leaning against the wall and one of the chairs had two legs snapped in two and was upside down sat on another chair with the broken legs sticking up. The kitchen was a similar story, the bathroom had the children’s toothbrushes sat in mould on the window sill and the back door wasn’t properly attached.
I don’t get angry at jobs very often but by the time I’d seen the bedrooms I was seething. The children’s bedrooms again had faeces smeared on the walls, the children’s mattresses were sodden with urine and the bed linen clearly had either never been changed or certainly hadn’t for a long time.
A dangerous door led to an attic room which the mother of the five children, who was pregnant with unlucky number six, assured me no one ever used. In the corner of the room was a pile of clothing, some covered in excrement, some had blood on it, all of it was filthy. The most startling and upsetting was the single mattress in the corner. On it was a teddy bear, a half eaten box of children’s cereal, and a mound of dog faeces.
Needless to say with the help of the on duty social services manager (who despite my normal moans and groans was brilliant) and my sergeant at the time we got the kids taken off the woman who was in turn arrested for neglect along with her spaced out excuse for a partner (father of the impending sixth child).
18 months on and that female has split up with Mr excuse for a man. She has three children back (the three eldest) and lives next door to her sister and mother in a different street. I visit her when I can to make sure she’s keeping the place nice and to be fair to her she has turned her life round. She’s also now a great informant and thinks I’m brilliant (she’s not all bad).