A woman has won a six-figure payout from South Lanarkshire Council after her lawyer argued the local government had failed to provide enough support or information during the placement.
Karen Maguire told BBC Scotland that the two year old boy she had adopted had issues sleeping, ‘hated being cuddled’ and ‘self-harmed’ by banging his head. It was later revealed that that the child had a serious underlying medical condition which Ms Maguire was not told about. The adoption took place in 2013 and broke down just after four months, but the battle against the council raged on for years in a bid to get them to recognise what Ms Maguire called their ‘failure’.
South Lanarkshire Council have commented saying that they aim to ‘provide full support’ to any prospective adoptive parents.Ms Maguire told the BBC she was speaking out for the first time to raise awareness of the lack of support for adoptive families.
Ms Maguire told the BBC she had applied to adopt a child as a lone parent and the approval process took six months to complete.
She said she went into the process with her “eyes wide open”.
Ms Maguire knew that many children in local authority care had social and emotional difficulties and she told social workers she was fine with a child with mild additional support needs. However, she said she would find it hard to cope on her own with a child with severe difficulties.
A two-year-old boy was identified as being suitable. The social worker who came to tell Ms Maguire the news stressed how lucky she was.
“At the time she said she didn’t know a lot about him, but said that he was relatively uncomplicated,” she said.
Later, Ms Maguire said she was told the child had a developmental delay.
The prospective mother claims she said she knew things were not going to be easy but felt she had good support from her wider family to help her cope.
Social workers told her the forms with more information on the toddler had not been written yet and that they could only provide verbal information at that time.
But Ms Maguire said she “knew something was wrong” as soon as the child came to live with her.
“When he came to me, he was covered in bruises and his face was cut from self-harming,” she said, “He came to me with a helmet that he was supposed to wear, such was the severity of the head-banging.”
Ms Maguire said daily life was a struggle. “He had rages,” she said. “For hours on end he was inconsolable. It was horrific to watch. He would be hanging from my hair or he would hit me about the head, the nose, the mouth.”
Ms Maguire said her pleas for help were dismissed and she felt let down.
“I got absolutely no support whatsoever,” she claimed, “They kept insisting there was absolutely nothing wrong and that it was me, imagining it. I needed immediate help.”
Ms Maguire told South Lanarkshire Council she was not coping. The mother said social work help was provided but she required more specialist support – a child psychologist or paediatrician – as she suspected there was more to the child’s problems than developmental delay.
She said her health visitor and a therapist wrote to the council supporting her need for extra help.
“I felt social workers could not see there were serious problems despite being advised by other professionals who had seen him,” she said., “They didn’t seem to believe me until the situation was completely out of hand.”
Ms Maguire reached crisis point when the boy threw a heavy paperweight at her head saying that if the object had hit her full on as she would have been ‘knocked out’, leaving the boy alone in the house with no one to tend to him. At this juncture Ms Maguire realised she could not ‘keep the boy safe’.
“If that had hit me full on it would have been catastrophic as it would have knocked me out and left him alone in the house,” she said.
Social workers visited that day and seeing her bruises suggested the placement should end.
She said “adoption disruption”, as it is called, should be a long road and efforts should be made to stop it happening.
Although the boy was in Ms Maguire’s care, legally the adoption hadn’t yet been approved by the courts. After further meetings and assessments Ms Maguire said she was asked to make the “life-changing” decision about whether to keep him.
“I believe there was a fine line between my desperate cry for help and them taking him,” she said, “I was under pressure and fighting an uphill battle.”
The boy returned to local authority care four months after being placed with Ms Maguire. She said she felt misled over the adoption.
It was only later that Ms Maguire found out about the boy’s underlying medical condition. “Everything I had thought from the very outset was correct, and yet I was made to feel that wasn’t the case throughout it all,” she said, also admitting she felt there was a ‘stigma’ around adoption disruption.
“I am consumed by guilt because I tried so hard to keep him, The stigma is that you’ve given your child back and people don’t understand the situation,” Ms Maguire commented, even revealing she had lost friends over the issue, and noticed people had been talking about her at work with one person comparing her adoption issues to ‘giving back a pair of trousers at M&S.
Lawyer Elizabeth Rose, from L&M Medilaw, acknowledged that in law a council does not generally owe an adoptive parent a duty of care.
However, she felt the lack of information provided to Karen prior to the boy being placed in her care, and lack of support during the placement, meant there was scope for the law to be tested.
“It was an unusual case,” she told BBC Scotland News.
“In this certain situation there were issues with the matching and assessment period prior to placement and I think it was time that the law challenged this.
“Essentially insufficient information was given to my client and as a result she wasn’t able to make an informed decision, and even when the placement started there was insufficient support given.”
South Lanarkshire Council paid Ms Maguire an undisclosed sum to settle the case, understood to be more than £100,000.
Dr Polly Cowan, from the charity Scottish Adoption, has looked at how often adoptions break down and the reasons why.
She analysed UK and international figures and estimates the rate to be between 2% and 25%, but said it is hard to get definite figures, because the way they are gathered in Scotland varies.
“There is a real need for support for families,” Dr Cowan said
“That is the real issue that needs to be talked about and thought about.”
She would like to see more funded support from the Scottish government, national guidelines for adoption and better monitoring of the number of adoption breakdowns.
