expired and I returned to work.
During those last months in Brazil, I had meeting after meeting. I was now operating outside the faith sector, engaging secular agencies and authorities, judges, psychologists, and academics. I addressed groups of magistrates, senior officials, and administrators. People heard I was there talking about foster care as an alternative to institutional care. They came looking for me. They wanted to hear what I had to share. I am often asked how that came about. How an unknown social worker, a former miner from the north of England, found himself dealing with elected officials and senior authorities, initially in Brazil and then around the world? How did I get the introductions? Why did they want to listen to me in the first place?
I can only say that it happened and that it happened very quickly, far more quickly than the painfully slow process of implementation and change. There was an openness and candor among the Brazilian professionals and a fascination with the British fostering system. In England and Wales if it is considered unsafe for a child to remain at home, local government tries various measures to improve the situation. If nothing changes then the local authority applies for a court order to remove the child from parental care. An independent social worker and lawyer are appointed to ensure the child’s views are central to any decisions made on their behalf. The judiciary is no longer involved once the court order is issued unless there is any need for further legal changes. The local government is responsible for all decisions, where a child lives, who they see and their overall welfare. In Brazil and some other countries there is a tendency for the judiciary to remain involved after issuing the order. They take active oversight of the care process and a child may not be fostered without their consent.
The Brazilian legal system differs from that of English-speaking countries. If I were to stand any chance at all of influencing policies and practice, I had to reach the judiciary. I had to find a platform. I had to earn the right to be heard. I had to understand the system if I was to help influence change.
My main contacts during my previous visits were with missionary organizations. They had dealings and contacts with the authorities of course, but the connections I now made happened independently. The most significant of these were with Isa Guará and her colleague Maria Lucia in São Paulo. Isa held a senior position in the city’s social services working with older children. Maria was a child psychologist and research academic. They invited me around to Maria’s home at ten on a Saturday morning, so I beat my way there by bus through the bustle of the sprawling city. We were there the rest of the day, talking excitedly well into the evening. Both women could speak some English and could understand far more and between that and my very basic Portuguese we were able to communicate.
“Tell us about the English system,” they said. “We want to know all about it.”
I explained that it was not my intention to promote or recommend a British approach over any other. Our system was far from perfect but it was consistent and there were aspects they might find helpful. For all its flaws, the British system was based on the premise that children belong in families, not institutions. The UK, along with most North American and European countries, had moved away from institutional solutions in favor of family-based care. All the evidence showed that children placed with foster families or with adoptive parents, irrespective of economic circumstances, fared better socially and educationally than those brought up in institutions.4
I related how I had worked in the residential care system and knew it from the inside. My role as a social worker was to find safe and secure family-based care for children unable to live with their family, either with foster parents or through adoption. I told them how I would arrange background and safeguarding checks, how the legal requirements operated, what support and training were available for foster parents.
I told them what I had observed of social work education and training in Brazil. There was nothing I could add on the academic and theoretical side. Brazil has universities that rank among the best in the world5 and Universidade de São Paulo is reckoned to be the best in Ibero-America.6
Social work education in Brazil was stimulating and academically rigorous yet often with little scope for students to gain practical experience. As a child psychologist, Maria knew all the accepted and standard texts and theories used the world over. The pioneering work on attachment theory by John Bowlby,7 later work by American and Australian practitioners—none of this was new in Brazil. The issue was not the quality of social work education but the lack of opportunity for application.
Competition for places at the higher quality, publicly funded universities is intense. A third of Brazilian graduates study at private or for-profit institutions. These run courses during the evenings as well as daytime so that people can work and study at the same time. It is common for a Brazilian student to work from 7:30 a.m. to around 6 p.m. and then spend from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. in lectures and tutorials. There are few opportunities for practical fieldwork in disciplines like psychology and social care. Students work to support themselves unless their parents can afford to do so and this limits the opportunity for practical placements and hands-on training.
Fostering was virtually unknown in Brazil at that time. Isa and Maria were keen to hear my experience of it in the UK context. Adoption was better known but associated by many with international adoption by wealthy foreign couples. The situation was complex; so many barriers, so many obstacles. I had a lot to say yet Isa and Maria Lucia heard me out. I was in full flow when Isa Guará leaned forward and held up her hand.
“Mick,” she said. “This can work in Brazil!”
1. Fostering and adoption practice inevitably varies from country to country. For example, fostering and adoption are increasingly seen in the US as a continuum and, according to a recent UK government review, 40% of the approximately 135,000 adoptions in the US each year start as fostering placements (Narey and Owers, Foster Care, 96). In contrast, very few fostering placements in England convert to adoption. According to government statistics, as of March 2017 there were 72,670 children in care in England, 74% of which were in fostering placements (UK Government, Children, 8). In 2017, 4,350 children in care were adopted, falling 8% from 2016 (Ibid., 13). A high proportion (86%) of children adopted were under three years old (Ibid., 14). Figures for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are recorded separately.
2. Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury, born in 1937, is a crossbench member of the UK House of Lords. She received a life peerage in 1982 and was deputy speaker from 1985 to 2005. She is CEO of Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust and a patron of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, acting as its president until 2006. She is the subject of two biographies: Boyd, A Voice for the Voiceless and Gilbert, Eyewitness to a Broken World.
3. Exod 2–3.
4. The detrimental effects of large-scale institutional care on child development have been documented since the early twentieth century. The American behavioral scientist Henry Dwight Chapin used statistical procedures to chart critical periods of social development across institutionalized infants at a time when the mortality rate in some US orphanages approached 100 percent (Gray, “Henry Dwight Chapin”). John Bowlby and many others reached similar conclusions in the mid-twentieth century. More recently, in 2007, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project compared the developmental capacities of children raised in large institutions with those in families and foster care. The study found shocking evidence of impaired physical development as well as lower IQ and higher rates of social and behavioral abnormalities (Nelson et al.,
