What Should Follow an Apology?

An Open Letter to Everyone Committed to Protecting Children and Families

An apology matters.

For people who spent much of their lives waiting for their experiences to be recognised, it may matter more than many of us can understand.

The national apology for historic forced adoption has put something into the public record that should have been acknowledged long ago. Mothers were separated from their children. Children grew up without knowing parts of their own history. Decisions that shaped entire lives were made in circumstances that we now look back on very differently.

It was right to acknowledge that.

But after an apology, there is always a quieter question.

What happens next?

There will be remembrance. There will be discussion about records, access to information, family tracing and support for those still living with the consequences.

All of that matters.

But I hope something else follows too.

I hope we become a little less certain of our own certainty.

That may sound like a small thing. In public systems, it is not.

People who work in child protection have to make decisions. Sometimes they have to make them quickly. They cannot approach every case as though nothing can ever be known. Children can be in real danger, and hesitation can have consequences.

But the opposite is also true.

A decision can be made carefully, professionally and with good intentions, and still turn out to have consequences that were not fully understood at the time.

History has shown us that.

So perhaps one thing that should follow an apology is a habit of asking one more question before we become too sure.

Not simply:

Are we allowed to do this?

But:

Are we sure this is the least harmful way forward?

Not simply:

What could happen if we leave this child here?

But also:

What could happen to this child if we permanently change these relationships?

These are not comfortable questions. They are not supposed to be.

Decisions about children and families should sometimes make us uncomfortable. The consequences are too important for easy certainty.

There is something else I hope follows this apology.

I hope we listen differently.

For many years, people affected by historic forced adoption tried to describe what had happened to them. Some were heard. Many felt they were not.

Eventually, enough voices survived long enough for the country to look again.

We should not need to repeat that pattern.

When people who have experienced today’s systems tell us something is not working, we do not have to accept every claim without question. But neither should we wait thirty or forty years before deciding that their experience is worth studying.

Listen while the system is still operating.

Listen while policies can still be changed.

Listen while relationships can still be repaired.

And listen to more than one side.

Listen to families.

Listen to adults who grew up in care or adoption.

Listen to social workers who know where the system is under strain.

Listen to judges and lawyers who see difficult cases repeatedly.

Listen to foster carers and kinship carers.

Listen to researchers.

Most of all, find ways of hearing children—not only at the moment decisions are being made, but years later, when they are old enough to tell us what those decisions came to mean.

There is no single group that possesses the whole truth about child protection.

That is precisely why we need one another.

I also hope the apology leads us to look again at what we mean by support.

Sometimes the difference between a family that manages and a family that collapses is not love.

It is housing.

Money.

Respite.

Mental health support.

Disability services.

Someone turning up at the right moment.

Someone staying long enough to help.

Of course support cannot solve everything. There are situations where a child cannot safely remain at home, however much assistance is offered.

But before society makes a permanent decision about a family, it should be able to say honestly that support was more than a word in a report.

It was something the family actually had a chance to receive.

And where separation is necessary, perhaps we should become more careful about what we preserve.

A child is more than a placement.

A child has grandparents, siblings, stories, photographs, language, culture, places and memories.

Safety must come first.

But safety does not always require erasing everything that came before it.

Sometimes protecting a child will mean creating distance from part of a family.

It should not automatically mean losing an entire history.

There is one final thing I hope follows an apology.

Curiosity.

A willingness to go back and look at our own decisions.

Not only the obvious disasters.

Not only the cases that become headlines.

The ordinary decisions too.

What happened five years later?

Ten years later?

Did the child feel safe?

Did they feel that they belonged?

What happened to sibling relationships?

What happened to identity?

Did the family understand why the decision was made?

Did the support promised at the time actually arrive?

And if the outcome was not what we expected, did anybody learn from it?

We collect enormous amounts of information before making decisions about children.

We should be equally interested in what happens after those decisions are made.

That is how a system learns.

Not by assuming that a completed case is a completed story.

The national apology has recognised something painful about Britain’s past.

It does not follow that today’s child protection system is the same as the system being apologised for. It is not.

But that should not be the end of the lesson.

The better question is whether knowing what happened then can make us more thoughtful now.

If it can, the apology will have done more than recognise the past.

It will have entered the present.

And perhaps that is what should follow an apology:

not another promise that we are now finally right,

but a quieter promise—

that we will keep looking, keep listening, and be willing to change when the evidence tells us we should.

Su Qing