After the Apology: Looking Forward Together

An Open Letter to Everyone Committed to Protecting Children and Families

A national apology asks us to look backwards.

But it should not leave us there.

The acknowledgement of historic forced adoption matters because it gives recognition to mothers, children and families whose experiences were too often hidden, minimised or left outside the public story.

Their history deserves to be remembered.

Their losses deserve to be recognised.

And the country was right to say so.

But after remembrance comes another responsibility.

How do we move forward?

Perhaps the answer begins with one word:

together.

Child protection is one of the most difficult responsibilities any society undertakes.

There are rarely perfect choices.

Professionals work with uncertainty.

Families may be frightened, angry or overwhelmed.

Courts are asked to make decisions whose consequences may last for an entire childhood.

And somewhere inside all of this is a child who did not choose the circumstances into which they were born, but whose life may be permanently shaped by what adults decide.

It is understandable that such a system produces disagreement.

What would be dangerous is allowing disagreement to become permanent division.

Professionals on one side.

Families on another.

Institutions defending themselves.

Critics assuming the worst.

Each group speaking mainly to those who already agree with them.

Children deserve something better than that.

They deserve a society capable of holding difficult truths together.

We should be able to say that children sometimes need protection from serious harm.

And we should also be able to say that family separation can itself carry profound consequences.

We should be able to respect social workers who make difficult decisions under enormous pressure.

And we should be able to listen seriously when families describe experiences of the system that were painful, confusing or damaging.

We should be able to recognise the authority of courts.

And we should still ask how decisions with lifelong consequences can remain transparent, proportionate and open to learning.

These positions do not have to cancel one another out.

Perhaps one of the lessons of history is that societies become vulnerable when difficult questions are forced into simple camps.

For or against.

Protection or family.

Professional or parent.

State or citizen.

But real life is rarely organised so neatly.

A child may need protection and still need their family.

A parent may need support without needing to be replaced.

A social worker may act with genuine concern and still work within a system capable of improvement.

A family may criticise an intervention and still believe deeply in the need to protect children.

If we are serious about learning from history, perhaps we should begin by making room for these complexities.

That requires a different kind of conversation.

Not a conversation designed to decide who is morally superior.

Not a conversation in which one side must lose before the other can be heard.

But a conversation organised around a shared question:

What helps children live safe, stable and connected lives?

Safety matters.

Stability matters.

But connection matters too.

Children live through relationships.

They understand themselves through people, memory, language, culture, family and belonging.

When intervention becomes necessary, those dimensions of a child’s life should not disappear from view.

The question should not simply be how to remove a child from danger.

It should also be how much of that child’s world can safely be preserved.

That may mean earlier support for families.

It may mean listening more carefully to relatives.

It may mean asking whether poverty, disability, isolation or lack of services are being mistaken for something they are not.

It may mean ensuring that families understand concerns before decisions become irreversible.

It may mean giving professionals enough time, resources and institutional support to work with families rather than simply process them.

And sometimes, despite every effort, it may still mean separation.

Looking forward together does not require pretending that every family can remain together.

It requires something more realistic:

that separation should never become easier simply because cooperation has become harder.

Before relationships are permanently broken, society should be able to say with confidence that reasonable possibilities for preserving them were genuinely explored.

This is where the history of forced adoption can speak to the future without being simplistically compared with the present.

Its lesson is not that every intervention is wrong.

Its lesson is not that professional judgment should disappear.

Its lesson is that when institutions make decisions about human relationships, they should remain aware that future generations may see consequences that the present cannot yet fully see.

That awareness should make us neither paralysed nor afraid.

It should make us careful.

It should make us curious.

And perhaps most importantly, it should make us willing to listen to one another.

Government cannot do this alone.

Social workers cannot do it alone.

Courts cannot do it alone.

Families cannot do it alone.

Researchers, charities, journalists and campaigners cannot do it alone.

The future of child protection belongs, in different ways, to all of them.

That means creating spaces where experience can meet expertise.

Where evidence can challenge habit.

Where criticism can lead to improvement rather than defensiveness.

Where professionals can acknowledge uncertainty without losing authority.

Where families can raise concerns without automatically being treated as hostile.

And where children, including adults who once lived through the system as children, can tell us what our decisions actually became in their lives.

Perhaps this is one of the opportunities created by a national apology.

It allows a society, for a moment, to step outside its usual positions.

To stop defending yesterday.

To stop accusing one another.

And to ask a more useful question:

What kind of system do we want the next generation to inherit?

Surely we want one that acts when children are in danger.

But also one that understands the value of family.

One that respects professional knowledge.

But also one that remains open to challenge.

One that makes difficult decisions.

But also one that remembers the human beings who must live with them.

One that learns from mistakes.

But, wherever possible, learns before those mistakes become history.

The apology belongs to the past.

What we do with it belongs to the future.

Perhaps the most respectful way to honour those whose lives were shaped by historic forced adoption is not simply to remember what happened to them.

It is to allow what happened to them to make us wiser about what we do next.

We cannot change the road behind us.

But the road ahead is still open.

Let us walk it carefully.

And where we can,

let us walk it together.

Su Qing