Sociology Research Seminar
Adoption in Australia: Policy, popular representation and research issues
30 July 2009, 12-2pm Menzies Building W10.10 Monash Clayton Campus (PSI Library)
Denise Cuthbert and Kate Murphy
Monash University
Abstract
In this presentation, we provide an overview of some of the research issues which we are dealing with in the Australian Research Council funded project The Search for Family: A History of Adoption in Australia by looking at contemporary Australian policy and popular discussions of adoption.
The first part of the presentation, presented by Kate Murphy, seeks to provide some historical and international perspectives on recent governmental initiatives that aim to re-instate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, /Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas/ (2005), and/ The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families /(2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug-addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti-adoption attitudes that have characterised the post-1970s period in response to the Stolen Generation and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.
The second part of the presentation, presented by Denise Cuthbert, provides further examination of the strong pro-adoption position articulated in the 2005 report on /Overseas Adoption/ and its enthusiastic positioning of intercountry adoption as a 'valid way of forming or adding to family' by reference to the popular advocacy of adoption by celebrity advocate Debra Lee Furness through her 'Orphan Angels' website and others. In these popular representations, as in the 2005 report, intercountry adoption is presented as an unqualified good and, it is argued, the understanding of adoption being presented is one which in many respects harks back to much earlier adoption narratives by which children are 'rescued' and 'redeemed' through adoption by good families At the same time, awareness of, or reference to, troubling or harmful aspects of adoption practices of the past are either repressed or denied.Biographical note
Denise Cuthbert and Kate Murphy are members of the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University, and are currently engaged in research towards a social history of child adoption in Australia. This work is funded by the Australian Research Council.