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When Julie Nevin put her only son to bed in late December 2010, he was seven months old. The next time she was allowed to perform that simple act, Reilly was a 16-month-old toddler. She and her husband David lost nine months of their little boy’s life after social services took him away over a [...]

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A child welfare agency in Norway has said it cannot hand over the two Indian children taken into foster care to their uncle because of reports of “conflicts” in the family. A Stavanger District Court hearing planned for Friday to decide the fate of the children has also been put off. This followed media reports [...]

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Would-be parents should not have to wait so long to be approved as adopters, the Welsh government has said. Ministers say creating a national adoption service will help eliminate waiting lists for prospective adopters. It is designed to get rid of delays in the time it takes to place children with families. Deputy social service [...]

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An 80-year-old nun has become the first person to be accused of baby snatching in the scandal over the trafficking of newborns in Spanish hospitals. Sister María Gómez has been formally named as a suspect in the investigation into one of more than 1,500 cases of suspected illegal trafficking of babies who were stolen, sold [...]

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Clutching her eight-week-old baby in the crook of her right arm, a large holdall in the other, Angela Patrick entered the offices of an adoption charity in west London. Told to wait, she settled into a chair, careful not to disturb her son, Paul, who was sleeping peacefully. The date was 16 January 1964. After [...]

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Charlize Theron has become a mother for the first time. A spokesperson for the Young Adult star confirmed that the 36-year-old Academy Award winner has adopted a baby boy named Jackson. In a statement to Us Weekly, they said: ‘Charlize Theron has adopted a child. She is the proud mom of a healthy baby boy [...]

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“The most valuable resource of any ethnic group is its children. Nevertheless, black children are being taken from black families by the process of the law and being placed in white families. It is, in essence, ‘internal colonialism’ and a new form of the slave trade, but only black children are used.” These words were [...]

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In a suburb of Newcastle, Jenny Lucas enjoyed a privileged upbringing that would see her rise to become a high-flying golf champion. She had no idea that her long-lost sister, Helen Edwards, was growing up suffering at the hands of her violent father. Now, after 55 years apart, the pair are together again and are [...]

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One of the first things you’ll see walking through my front door is my family gallery. Both sides of the hallway are hung with photographs, some dating back more than 100 years. Pride of place goes to a large picture of Blackrod Brass Band in 1923, in which my grandad, then aged 18, stands next [...]

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Prime Minister David Cameron is setting out proposals to speed up the adoption process in England, ahead of the launch of the government’s “Adoption Action Plan” next week. Local authorities will be told not to delay adoptions “in a search for the perfect match”. The latest government figures suggest there are 6,770 children who have [...]

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David Cameron will today demand that councils speed up their adoption services amid concern that vulnerable children are being condemned to years in care by red tape and political correctness. The Government is expected to set out plans for a more effective national register to match children with families who want to adopt, even if [...]

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These are the pictures proving that there is finally love and happiness for the boy who suffered the most appalling neglect when his American adoptive mother sent him on a plane back to his Russian motherland with a note saying she no longer wanted him. Torry Hansen, a 34-year-old nurse, unilaterally revoked her adoption of [...]

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Prime Minister David Cameron is setting out proposals to speed up the adoption process in England, ahead of the launch of the government’s “Adoption Action Plan” next week. Local authorities will be told not to delay adoptions “in a search for the perfect match”. The latest government figures suggest there are 6,770 children who have [...]

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David Cameron has set out plans to create a “fairer, faster” adoption process – including moves to make it easier for white couples to adopt black children. The prime minister said there was “no more urgent task” for the government and promised to legislate to force councils to speed up the process. As well as [...]

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The prime minister will vow to tackle “absurd barriers to mixed-race adoption”, when he sets out proposals to speed up adoptions in England later. David Cameron will say “young lives are being wasted while the process takes its toll”. Local authorities will be told not to delay adoptions “in a search for the perfect match”. [...]

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When Jan Parks spoke to a social worker about adopting, she was asked whether her husband – an army officer – would be able to leave his “disciplinary side” at home. The comment was typical of the insults many military couples endure when seeking to adopt. One was told by their local authority that they [...]

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A mother has lost parts of both of her legs after she saved the lives of her two children by laying on top of them as a deadly tornado swept through their home. Stephanie Decker, 36, lost one leg above the knee and the other above the ankle, yet her son and daughter escaped without [...]

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I always knew I was adopted. My mother told me I’d been chosen and I should feel extra special. A tall blonde growing up with short, brunette Jewish parents, all I ever felt was awkward and out of place. When I was about nine, I began to think endlessly about my biological parents. Was my [...]

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Lily Arthur gave birth to her son, Tim, while shackled to a hospital bed in Brisbane. She was allowed to cradle him in her arms for five minutes – but only after signing an adoption consent form. It was 1967, and Ms Arthur was 17 years old. It took her three decades to track down [...]

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Local authorities in England will only get an outstanding rating for adoption in future if they place children within 12 months, Ofsted says. Its inspectors, who check children’s services as well as schools, say delays can have a severe impact on children. New arrangements put more emphasis on speed and on whether councils have kept [...]

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The Government is to legislate to ensure that potential adoptions are not blocked purely because the would-be parents are not the same race as the child, Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced. Mr Gove – who was himself adopted at four months – said it was “disgraceful” that black children are three times less likely [...]

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The law is to be changed to stop councils blocking mixed-race adoptions as part of radical reforms to ensure children are removed from unfit parents more quickly. Education Secretary Michael Gove said there was ‘horrifying’ evidence that youngsters were being left in dangerous homes for too long. Mr Gove, who was adopted at four months, [...]

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More than half of children in care are given a week’s notice or less of being moved to another foster home, research suggests. Nearly a quarter are given no notice at all, suggests the survey of 2,000 children for England’s Children’s Rights Director Roger Morgan. Three-quarters of those in care with siblings reported they had [...]

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The law is to be changed to stop councils blocking mixed-race adoptions as part of radical reforms to ensure children are removed from unfit parents more quickly. Education Secretary Michael Gove said there was ‘horrifying’ evidence that youngsters were being left in dangerous homes for too long. Mr Gove, who was adopted at four months, [...]

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A 13-year-old boy is feared to have killed himself after his body was found in bed at his care home. Mohammed Alam Naseem was discovered in his bed at Woodside House specialist children’s home Darwen, Lancashire, on Monday lunchtime. Police investigating the youngster’s death are looking into the possibility that he suffocated, adding that there [...]

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The mother says she made a pact with the father during a restaurant meeting before the boy was conceived that she and her lover would fill the role of “primary parents” within a “nuclear family” and that he would not stand on his paternal rights. But now she and her partner say they feel “bitter [...]

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Singles who long for children without the obligation of romantic involvement can now search for their perfect ‘co-parenting’ match online, thanks to a new website. Launched last week, Modamily calls itself: ‘The first online community to facilitate introductions between responsible, like-minded adults committed to co-parenting a child.’ So far the New-York based service that caters [...]

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John Goldup, Deputy Chief Inspector at Ofsted, said in the past the quango had failed to concentrate on the most important aspects of the treatment for vulnerable children. He said inspectors were assessing adoption providers within an “inappropriate straitjacket” that ignored how quickly adoptive parents could be found, and people were right to question why [...]

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Non-identical twins Emilie Falk and Lin Backman – strangers until last year – were separated nearly 29 years ago. According to a DNA test the pair had done two months after reuniting in January last year, and which they shared with AFP, there is a 99.98 per cent chance of them being sisters. A complex [...]

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The bodies of civil servants Robert Kamin, 55, and Susan Poff, 50, were found under blankets in a parked car outside their home in Oakland, California. They had been strangled. Police believe someone then tried to set light to the car which was charred. Friends and relatives said the couple had worked tirelessly for the [...]

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A couple in their fifties who looked after a baby girl for a year have been told they are too old to legally adopt the child. The foster parents in Whitley, Berkshire had looked after the child to help out her 17-year-old natural mother and had raised the little girl since last March. But after [...]

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After scandals such as Baby P, many social workers feel criticised from all sides. The difficult nature of their job is revealed as the BBC is given unprecedented access to the Bristol child protection team. It was newly qualified social worker Susanne’s first case. Three-year-old Toby could not speak and still had to use a [...]

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The fostering system is failing thousands of vulnerable children who end up in jail and lacking basic qualifications, a report has warned. The number of youngsters in placements has risen 16% since 2006 to more than 48,000, putting carers under huge strain. Only a third of youngsters in the system achieve basic levels in maths [...]

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A Taiwanese woman, sold to a family as a slave at the age of seven, has just been reunited with the mother that sent her away. Going by the fake name ‘Isabel’ for fear that her former owners may track her down, the domestic slave spent around 20 years in squalid conditions, dreaming of the [...]

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Ben Elliot, the Duchess of Cornwall’s nephew, does not yet have any children with his glamorous new wife, but he may soon be the guardian to the offspring of numerous oligarchs. Mandrake can disclose that Elliot is extending his concierge service, Quintessentially, into the increasingly lucrative market for children’s tutors. As part of his service, [...]

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On a day at the seaside last summer, David Wren watched a father and his son playing crazy golf in the sunshine. “They just looked so happy together. I turned to my partner and said: ‘I want a kid.’ He replied: ‘Me too’ and that was how we came to apply to adopt.” The same-sex [...]

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All children under five in care in London should be sent a free book a month to boost their reading and prospects later in life, the Commons was being told today. Senior Labour MP John Healey urged Mayor Boris Johnson and his Labour challenger Ken Livingstone to back the Imagination Library scheme, already running in [...]

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Sallyanne Jones is cradling her seven-month-old baby on her lap, smiling at her little face. But how would she feel if she had to give her child up this afternoon, knowing she wouldn’t see her again for at least 18 years, and possibly never? It’s not a question you would usually put to a new [...]

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Turkish authorities have asked the British government to help obtain evidence to prosecute the Duchess over allegations that she breached the privacy of children living in state-run institutions. The Turkish government accused the Duchess of trying to smear the country’s image three years ago with an investigative television report about conditions in its orphanages. On [...]

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Ofsted, the quango that monitors all young people’s services including schools, is to focus its visits on four main areas rather than 13. It will also cut the notice time given before inspectors arrive from eight weeks to 10 days. Users of adoption agencies, including birth and adoptive parents as well as children themselves, will [...]

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Children are being abandoned on Greece’s streets by their poverty-stricken families who cannot afford to look after them any more. Youngsters are being dumped by their parents who are struggling to make ends meet in what is fast becoming the most tragic human consequence of the Euro crisis. It comes as pharmacists revealed the country [...]

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Greece’s financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all – their children. One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils. “I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I [...]

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Vulnerable children older than 10 are being “forgotten” amid an “urgent” need for foster carers, a charity has warned. According to Barnardo’s, at least 8,750 new foster families must be found within the next year. But while there is considerable focus on placing babies and younger children, “the needs of older children are being forgotten,” [...]

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Concerns about Facebook threats to adopted children are being raised again as children adopted because of abuse and neglect are still being contacted out of the blue by their birth parents. The decision to remove a child is, in my experience, not taken lightly, but made with the aim of changing a child’s likely developmental [...]

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This year Randy Ryder will meet his mother for the first time. When he was born in a hospital in Málaga, southern Spain, in 1971 the doctor who signed his birth certificate named his mother as Roswitha Huber, an Austrian woman who was unable to have children of her own. It was only a dozen [...]

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Adopted children are having their lives thrown into chaos by Facebook messages from birth parents who neglected or abused them when they were younger, charities have warned. A big increase in unsolicited contact from parents who track down children who were taken into care for safeguarding has led to serious disruptions in the adoption process. [...]

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The popularity of social networking websites has seen an increase in breaches of guidelines against unplanned contact with hundreds of adopted children unexpectedly hearing from their natural families. In the worst cases, some young people taken into care in the 1990s have seen relationships with their adoptive families completely break down after hearing from their [...]

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An adopted woman spent her whole life thinking she was an only child unaware she had nine siblings living minutes from her home. Susan Walton had always longed for a brother or sister to play with after being adopted when she was six months old. Now, at the age of 64, Susan has discovered she [...]

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What a refreshing change to read Anthony Douglas’s article (There is no right to adopt, 23 December).

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A baby at risk of becoming the victim of an ”honour killing” because she was born as the result of her Muslim mother’s secret affair must be adopted to keep her safe, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

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