Diana Thorburn | Changing Jamaica’s adoption law is necessary

There are several explanations for why, despite approximately 4,500 children in state care – of whom roughly 2,000 are in children’s homes and well over 1,000 in foster care – fewer than 20 wards of the State each year are placed with any of the more than 100 approved adopters currently on the wait list.

However, CAPRI’s report, Home Advantage: Reforming Jamaica’s Adoption System, finds that the central reason children who cannot safely remain with their biological families become stuck in state care, in some cases until they are 18, is because the system treats adoption as a last resort. According to current practice, placing children with desiring adoptive parents only happens after exhausting every other avenue, regardless of how long that process takes.

Lack of institutional capacity, outdated and misaligned laws, a weak governance and accountability framework, lack of enforceable timelines, and a paucity of social workers all contribute to the low number of adoptive placements each year. But the primary cause is that the Child Care and Protection Act (CCPA) frames the best interest of the child primarily in relation to the family of origin – interpreted in practice to mean that every possible effort should be made to return the child to their biological family, and failing that, state care is preferable to adoption.

This belief system results in children spending years in an institution, sometimes their entire childhood, subject to repeated attempts at family reunification, which the data indicate fail more often than they succeed. Remaining in temporary foster care forestalls legal permanency and the stable sense of belonging that a child, particularly one who has already entered state care, needs and deserves.

LEGAL REFORM

Legal reform is imperative. Our adoption law has not been updated since 1958 and is not interoperable with the CCPA. Foster care, which is not legislated or regulated, should be governed by new statutory provisions that include concurrent planning so that prospective adopters can foster a child until they are legally cleared for adoption. Adoptions should also be open rather than closed – that is, adoptees and birth parents should have access to information about their biological families and the circumstances and outcomes of their adoptions – given the overwhelming evidence that open adoption is associated with better outcomes and is consistent with the informal adoption practices long widely observed in Jamaica.

Revised legislation, however, is insufficient. South Africa’s experience offers a cautionary parallel. In 2005, it enacted a comprehensive Children’s Act that modernised its adoption framework and introduced clearer definitions of abandonment and timelines. Yet adoption numbers declined rather than increased because institutional norms continued to privilege biological family preservation even where reunification was unlikely. The lesson for Jamaica is that legislative reform must be accompanied by a deliberate, explicit, and properly resourced shift in how permanency is understood and pursued.

There is also a nuanced but noteworthy paradox: the weak institutional arrangement, dated legal framework, and fragmented governance and accountability structures (all detailed in CAPRI’s earlier report: Fix the Village: Governance and Accountability for Children in State Care) mean that some change is possible even without legislative reform. Authority over adoption and much of the child-protection system rests, in practical terms, within the office of the head of the agency with responsibility for children. This concentration of authority is suboptimal, and we have seen it be abused with grave consequences as in the Embracing Orphans debacle where the agency entered into partnerships with a known paedophile and girls were assaulted. But it does create scope to operationalise new evidence-informed practices through internal directives without having to wait on Jamaica’s slow legislative process.

POLICY CHANGES

New laws are still required to codify policy changes and provide durability beyond individual officeholders and to guide judicial decision-making. Though Home Advantage did not examine court processes, there is evidence that without statutory guidance, judges exercise wide discretion, particularly regarding dispensing with parental consent of birthfathers. In some cases, the absence of clear legal standards has led to protracted inquiries, arbitrary rulings, and retraumatisation of birthmothers – including where conception occurred through sexual assault – which cannot possibly be in the best interest of the child.

Increasing staff, change management, and a comprehensive functioning data system will require additional resources from central government, but those are political, not legal, decisions. The announcement in the 2026 Throne Speech of a new Child and Family Division in the Ministry of Education, Youth, Skills & Information could signal that those resources might, at last, be forthcoming. The evidence is clear that reforming the child-protection system to make adoption a priority rather than a last resort will improve the life chances of children who cannot be raised by their biological families, strengthen families overall, protect the cognitive development of our future workforce, and reduce the fiscal burden of prolonged state care. We may now have an opportunity to make good on this promise.

Increasing staff, change management, and a comprehensive functioning data system – the prerequisites for strengthening the child-protection sector – will require additional resources from central government, but those are political, not legal, decisions. The announcement in the 2026 Throne Speech of a new Child and Family Division in the Ministry of Education, Youth, Skills & Information could be a signal that those resources might be, at last, forthcoming. The evidence is clear that reforming the child- protection system to make adoption a priority, not a last resort, will result in several developmental gains: improving the life chances of children who cannot be raised by their biological families, strengthening families overall, protecting the cognitive development of members of our future workforce, and reducing the fiscal burden associated with prolonged state care. We may now have an opportunity to make good on this promise

Diana Thorburn, PhD, is the director of research at CAPRI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.