David Akinsanya was in care and is now an adoption
campaigner. He tells Andrew Mickel about his experiences of being
in care and working with potential adopters in Channel 4's Find
me a Family series
Statistics show that what people want are white female babies,
but they're rarely available. What's available is mixed race, older
kids and those with learning difficulties," says David
Akinsanya.
"If you're going to adopt a child you'll get a piece of paper
describing a child, but people see words like 'emotional
difficulties' or 'sibling groups' and they get put off. I arrange
parents in the programmes face. Born in 1965 to a Nigerian father
and English mother, he was initially raised in a private fostering
arrangement with another family. However, when his birth mother
stopped paying for the placement after her new partner objected, he
became a ward of Essex Council and later ended up with a criminal
record.
His story from this point may seem an all-too-familiar account
of how the care system can fail young people. But there are two
figures from Akinsanya's childhood who he says embody what the
system needs today.
The first he came across when he was placed at Battleswick group
home in Basildon. Akinsanya says it was "a really pure,
three-meals-a-day kind of upbringing" with an indomitable but
loving figurehead called Auntie Betty. "With Betty it was a real
'wait until your father gets home' scenario - I feared her, but we
did get love from staff.
"However, a new area organiser came in and decided they didn't
want matriarchs. A whole lot of young staff came in - some were in
their 20s. I played up with them."
Moved to sink
estate
After biting a primary school teacher he was sent to a
residential school, although he eventually returned to mainstream
education and moved into a new care home with 18 other teenagers.
His last experience of the care system was being moved aged 16 to
an experimental independent home in a sink estate in Basildon.
"There were just occasional staff visits. By day I was in
college, but I was out all night committing crimes, stealing cars
and breaking into the college," he says. When he was eventually
caught by the police, his fingerprints linked him to several
previous crimes and, aged 18, he was sent to prison.
He attributes his success after prison to the presence in his
life of his old social worker, Jenni Randall. Although only
assigned to him from the ages of eight to 14, she fought to be
allowed to stay in touch with him afterwards and became his "social
aunt".
"When I went to prison, Jenni was the only person who visited
me," he says. "I decided not to get into trouble any more because
of her. I still see her at Christmas."
Need for professional
room
Staff who work with children in care need to have the
professional room to be able to love children, he says, as both
Randall and Auntie Betty were able to do.
Good residential care has to be provided for those who can't
thrive in adoption, he says, highlighting a family-style group home
in Leicestershire as a successful example.
"They are expensive because they can have just four teenagers in
them, but the kids seem happy. I watched the staff, and they were
loving," he says.
In the Channel 4 series, adults are put through different
scenarios with real children to show them the types of
responsibilities and challenges they would face as adoptive
parents. While doing this sort of thing is often beyond the funding
capacity of an adoption agency, Akinsanya says it has real promise
as a way of giving prospective adopters a proper understanding of
what they would be getting in to.
He acknowledges that it is not easy to arrange these "trials",
but that they provide a useful reality check for all involved. "If
you think you can do it, that's great. But [it's useful to know]
these are the issues you're going to have to confront."
David Akinsanya is a broadcaster and adoption
campaigner
Find Me a Family, Channel 4, 11-13 May, 9pm