Scandal of the babies parents won't adopt because they're called Chrystal and Chardonnay . . . and the social workers who won't let them change their names

By Kate Gallagher

Published: 19:21 EST, 6 May 2012 | Updated: 05:09 EST, 7 May 2012

A whistleblower reveals a shocking new twist to Britain's adoption shambles - and why social workers, obsessed with the rights of dysfunctional birth families, refuse to do anything about it.

Sad: Children are being by-passed for adoption simply because of their name in a shocking revelation

Sitting on a Winnie The Pooh blanket, a baby girl waves her chubby arms with joy as she attempts to stack up some wooden bricks, chuckling each time they fall down.

At less than a year, she would be the perfect child for any couple unable to have a baby of their own. You would also assume her time on the adoption register would be short.

But instead of a loving home and the prospect of a good start in life, it’s highly likely she will languish in the care system for some time to come.

The reason? Well, unfortunately she’s called Chardonnay — as opposed to, say, Charlotte — and for this reason she will struggle to be placed.

It might sound like a joke, but as someone who has worked for one county’s adoption system for the past two years, I can tell you that it’s far from a funny situation. As a member of an adoption board that approves adoptive parents and the children who are adopted, I have signed a confidentiality agreement to protect the identity of the children involved.

That's why I'm using a pseudonym and have changed some of the names involved.

But I feel duty-bound to dispel the myth that there are only a handful of babies available for adoption and droves of parents waiting and willing to take them — and to expose how a misguided system is failing vulnerable children.

From what I have witnessed, our adoption system is in crisis. At the heart of the problem? A toxic combination of old-fashioned British snobbery, and a political correctness that prizes the feelings of the birth parents above the well-being of the children it’s supposed to be helping.

Since the case of Baby P, who was killed by his mother’s boyfriend in 2007, the number of children taken into care has spiralled, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of that tragedy.

As a result, the number of children available for adoption has also shot up.

For example, my county has around 125 children, 60 of them under two, who need to be adopted and just 15 couples in the pipeline prepared to adopt — a massive shortfall, and a picture that is reflected all over Britain.

In recent years the number of children taken into care has spiralled, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the Baby P tragedy

The situation reminds me of two conveyor belts: one moving fast with ever-more children being added to it, the other running alongside very slowly and carrying only a trickle of would-be parents.

Without a doubt, one of the issues stemming the flow of would-be adoptive parents is class.

I always feel sorry for potential adopters, those hard-working and educated people, with their good intentions and bright smiles, who think they will get the poor orphan girl they read about in the paper whose parents died in a crash on the M25, or the cute baby boy abandoned in the loo at Heathrow when he was two minutes old. Those are real cases, but they are very rare.

The majority of adoption cases are a much more complicated business.
Just as last summer’s riots shone a light on Britain’s predominantly unemployed underclass, so does the adoption process — except that because it’s so secret, only a very few people witness it.

The reality is that most children up for adoption, even babies, come from dire backgrounds, where it’s highly likely Dad has been in prison and Mum was addicted to heaven knows what illegal substances and working as a prostitute.

And while some adopted children will go on to have behavioural problems because of their poor start in life, there are still many successful adoptions that take place.

But, unfortunately, the names of these blameless children make their less-than-middle-class backgrounds all too obvious. And most prospective parents don’t want to adopt children who are named after someone’s favourite celebrity or tipple.

Dreams dashed: Things might have been bad enough for a child with an abusive parent - but adoption is often harder than would be expected (Posed by model)

For some reason there is currently a fashion, among those whose children are forcibly removed, for calling little girls after drinks — hence two recent babies called Chardonnay and Champagne. There is also a tendency to name girls after jewels, though often misspelt: Rubie, Emmarald, Jayde, Chrystal.

And there are those birth parents who think, why ruin your child’s future with just one dreadful name when you can wallop them straight into the gutter of life with two? So we on the adoption board who are trying to place these children in loving homes are confronted with Gemma-Mai, Courtney-Mai, Alexia-Mai, Lily-Mai, Shania-Rae and so on, names which will mark them out for their whole lives as members of a peculiarly British underclass.

Simply put, the children’s names do not fit with the social demographic of the people coming forward to give them homes.

You might think a simple, and obvious, solution would be for adoptive parents to change the child’s name. After all, under-twos are still young enough to adapt to a new identity and will have no memory of their birth name.

But in the past few years it has become standard practice for social workers to recommend that the birth name be retained, a suggestion which is then rubber-stamped by the judge at adoption hearings.

Changing the name is something adoptive parents almost always want to do, especially if they already have birth children of their own. Naturally you want a new child to blend in with your existing family — but will Chardonnay ever fit in with Henry, James and William? No.

A good friend adopted a beautiful little girl but was unhappy with her first name, even worse than those listed above, and she knew it was also the name of the birth mother’s psychiatric nurse.

She said: ‘We adopted her so now she’s our child, but another woman chose that name and it’s awful. It’s also a constant reminder that the birth mother had mental health problems. Surely the least they could do for adoptive parents is allow them to choose a fresh name?’

In her case, the social workers said that changing the name would be ‘a loss of the child’s family identity’. The proud family identity, presumably, which turned out three generations of career criminals.

It might sound flippant, but I honestly think there would be many more adoptive parents if they were allowed to change the baby’s name.

Martin Narey, the Government’s adoption tsar appointed last July, obviously agrees, as it’s an issue he has pledged to tackle.

Face doesn't fit: Many prospective adoptive parents decide against bringing in a 'Chardonnay' or 'Chrystal' alongside 'Henry' and 'William' (Posed by model)

But the matter of names is just a symptom of a wider problem: that of a current obsession with keeping children in touch with their roots.

Adoption is supposed to help children escape deprived and unstable homes — but only if they can get past their troubled origins and be adopted in the first place. And this is where we come to that disaster zone known coyly as ‘the background papers’.

Adoptive parents often think they will get a few pages about the child they are being offered, covering basic information. Instead they get a file the size of the Yellow Pages, full of details that would make your hair stand on end.

For some reason known only to social workers, the reports disclose often unsavoury and unnecessary information that is off-putting to those new to the system and from immaculate homes.

A typical example might read: ‘Chrystal-Mai suffered from nits for 18 months and was excluded from nursery. She misses her daddy who is in jail serving 15 years for distributing paedophile images.’

As the nits would have been treated at the foster carer’s home, why mention them? And as for Chrystal-Mai’s father — it’s not unheard of for men like this to be entitled to regular reports on their child’s development, even after adoption. The Human Rights Act has a lot to answer for.

With contact, there are different rules for each child depending on how reluctant the birth family was to give them up. So while one mother might give birth and do a runner, another mother, or indeed grandmother or auntie, might kick up such a fuss about the adoption that social workers cave in and offer annual meetings or contact by letter.

Again, never mind the child, it’s the birth family’s rights that are deemed to be important.

One couple I came across were on the verge of adopting a six-month-old boy when they discovered that he would have to meet his birth family every year ‘to continue the link with his identity’.

This birth family included crack addicts and criminals, essentially the very people whose behaviour had put him into the care system in the first place.

Similarly alarming is the ‘Letterbox’ system whereby people who adopt a child then have to send regular letters to the birth family via social workers, making it possible for the birth family to identify the child’s whereabouts, especially as children get older and start writing the letters themselves and adding lots of details.

In previous generations, even as recently as the late 1980s, children were adopted and a shutter came down on their past. Background details were sparse and they had to wait until they were 18 to apply for their birth certificate. But since then, the system has changed — and not necessarily for the benefit of the child or the adoptive parents.

The rules about keeping birth names and maintaining contact came about after studies showed that when adoptive children grew up, they often expressed a wish to learn about their roots. However, the impact of this move towards greater contact with birth parents has been devastating, deterring potential adoptive parents and often unsettling adopted children

No wonder people go abroad to adopt. Russia, for instance, has a system which insists that adoptive parents know as little as possible about the background of the child with whom they have been matched. The documents will say: ‘Anastasia was abandoned at six hours old. Her health is good. Her mother signed the adoption forms of her own free will and wanted Anastasia to have a better life than she could offer.’ The end.

The system sounds brutal, and if things don’t work out with an adopted child, a minority of adoptive parents may complain that they were misled. But the system we have at the moment is like picking at an old wound. It cannot be coincidence that one in five adoptions in the UK fails, while the failure rate for overseas adoptions is virtually nil.

The fact that there has been a sharp increase in the number of ‘bedside babies’ in the UK, those taken from their mothers a few hours after birth because she has proved such an unfit mother that her previous children are all in care, could help us to emulate those countries with more successful adoption systems.

Instead of turning up their noses, prospective adopters need to see these children as a blank canvas, an innocent, and be brave enough to look past the dreadful birth name and the background details.

With lots of love and the right guidance, the child will grow into someone any parent could be proud of.

We need to think more about the huge adoption success stories: Kate Adie, the singer Debbie Harry, Education Secretary Michael Gove.

It is my view that adoptive parents should have the right to change the first name of a child if they want to, really awful background details should be toned down and dreadful birth parents should forfeit their parental rights entirely.

The Americans say that any American child has the right to grow up and be President. So, who knows, with a few more common sense rules in the adoption system, little Chardonnay might one day grow up to be Prime Minister. Sadly, as things stand, it’s highly unlikely.

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