To study the thresholds for intervention, the rationale and justification for a decision about adoption from care, we have collected all the first instance court judgements from eight countries for one year, and sometimes several years. Below a brief overview of the data material collection from each country is presented.
Projects: DISCRETION, ACCEPTABILITY
Adoptions from care
In Austria, the empirical data used in the analysis consist of all adoption from care cases decided in 2016-2017 in Austria. The Ministry of Justice has granted the project access to all the judgements related to child support and custody (Kindschaftsrecht) in Austria for 2016 and 2017. Most of the Child Protective Services in the States searched their case files, which contains the file numbers of the judgments, and provided us with a list of 44 judgment numbers in total for their cases related to adoptions from care for 2016 and 2017. Among these, we have identified 15 cases that meet our selection criteria.
Adoptions from care
For England, the empirical data used in the project consists of all publicly available (n=31) placement order cases decided in 2016 (published in BAILII, British and Irish Legal Information Institute, database), as well as placement order cases collected from two large court areas (n=29). Cases were found first by searching BAILII for decisions made by the England and Wales Family Court in 2016. Out of 121 decisions, 31 were identified as placement orders. The second search was done in the court’s registry. From a list of 147 placement order cases, we retrieved 29 written judgments.
Adoptions from care
In Estonia, the empirical data used in the analysis consists of all (n=25) adoption judgments against the wishes of the parents decided between 2013-16 in one district court. The Ministry of Justice in Estonia compiled a list of all adoption judgments for 2013-2016 as decided by the four district courts. We requested access to the judgments from the four district court. One of them granted access to the judgments and reviewed the list of the Ministry based on our inclusion criteria. We received a total of 28 judgments from this court. We manually reviewed the cases for the inclusion and excluded 3 of the judgments as they did not fit our inclusion criteria.
Adoptions from care
For Finland, the empirical data used in the research consists of all judgements (n=13) of adoptions from care decided in 2015 and 2016. These had been identified from an overall sample of 623 domestic adoptions of minors in those two years for a previous Finnish study by Laine et al. (2018). The district courts who had given access to the judgements for that study were contacted to obtain approval to access the same material for the current research. This was granted and the full sample of 13 cases was used as empirical material in this project.
Adoptions from care
In Germany, the empirical data used in the research consist of all adoption from care cases decided between 2015-18 in one large German state and in a big city in another state (n=29). We have access to all adoption from care decisions via the youth welfare offices, in which parental consent to the adoption was substituted by the court on the basis of sec. 1748 BGB (German Civil Code). These were identified by a search for decisions made under this provision, and in which the child was adopted in the years 2015-18. This yielded a total of 37 cases, eight of which were manually excluded as step-parent adoptions. This resulted in a total sample of 29 cases that concern adoptions from care.
Adoptions from care
Irish data collection is currently pending.
Adoptions from care
For Norway, we have access to all judgments (n=58) from the county board concerning child protection adoptions, i.e. based on the child welfare act § 4-20. For 2016, it was a total of 58 judgements. For some analyses we only use a randomized sample of 29 judgements, based on ordering the 58 judgements chronologically after decision date, and selecting every second judgement.
Adoptions from care
For Spain, we have access to all judgements relating to adoptions from care (n=13) from one of the regions in Spain in 2016. Decisions in that region are made by the first instance court. In Spain, the decisions are of a different format than in other countries included in the project. Rather than a full length written decision, the Court ratifies or refuses to ratify the case made before it by the Child Protection Commission. In our analysis, we have therefore included the Child Protection Commission proposal, and the Court decision.