The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) has issued an unreserved apology for social work’s role in historic forced adoption.
The decision comes on the back of a motion from the association’s Black Country branch to last week’s annual general meeting (AGM), calling on it to apologise on behalf of the profession in recognition of the long-term impact of forced adoptions on mothers and adoptees.
It follows the apology issued by the UK government in July this year to the thousands of unmarried mothers who were coerced, shamed or misled into giving up their babies for adoption, mainly between 1949 and 1976. Apologies have also been issued by the Catholic Church, in 2016, the Scottish Government and Welsh Government, in 2023, and the Church of England, earlier this year.
A 2022 report by Parliament’s joint committee on human rights said that pressure on mothers to give up their babies came from families, religious institutions and practitioners, including social workers.
According to a report published this year on social work’s role in historic forced adoption, “moral welfare workers were the principal group of social work professionals involved in both identifying and referring mostly young, unmarried women to mother and baby homes, and in arranging adoptions”.
The role of moral welfare workers
The report, by historian of the welfare state Michael Lambert, said these practitioners were employed by religious moral welfare associations, and, though their role modernised over time, “religious judgments of shame, sin and sexual transgression of gendered norms remained”.
“Through both their social work and religious lenses, moral welfare workers conceptualised unmarried motherhood as a social problem, a type of moral pathology with illegitimacy serving as a proxy indicator for failed families and homes within post-war norms,” added Lambert, lecturer in medical humanities at Lancaster University.
A Moral Welfare Workers Association was set up in 1938 and was one of the organisations that merged to create BASW in 1970.
Mothers suffered ‘unimaginable pain and trauma’ – BASW
Issuing BASW’s apology, interim chief executive Sam Baron said: “BASW is issuing this apology following a motion from our members at our 2026 AGM and we completely agree that we, as the voice of social work, need to acknowledge the history and responsibility of moral welfare workers from this time.
“Mothers had their children removed from them without their informed consent, which would have caused unimaginable pain and trauma. As a reflective profession, it is only right that the social work sector apologises and recognises these injustices and the lasting trauma endured by affected women, children and families.”
The motion from the Black Country branch was passed unopposed at the AGM. A spokesperson for the branch said: “It is an incredibly important issue for us as a profession to also acknowledge our accountability.”
While BASW’s apology focused on the role of moral welfare workers, Lambert’s report also pointed to social work having a wider responsibility in relation to historic forced adoption.
Wider role of social work in historic forced adoptions
He said the lack of state financial support for unmarried mothers meant they were typically in poverty and unable to provide for their children materially, making them reliant on local authority children’s departments. Many social workers, influenced by John Bowlby’s idea of maternal deprivation (source: The Therapeutic Care Journal), believed unmarried mothers would not be able to provide their children with the continuous and stable care that they needed, necessitating their adoption as early as possible.
“These experiences meant that social workers routinely and consistently referred young, unmarried women to moral welfare workers in the best interests of the child and in terms of the financial and organisational priorities of the institution which employed them,” said Lambert.
“Whilst social work interventions with unmarried mothers and illegitimate children through adoption came under the specialised field of moral welfare, other specialised branches worked within a system which normalised their actions, and underpinning diagnosis of social pathology, through their everyday, routine activities.”
While there is no reliable figure for the number of such adoptions, the parliamentary joint committee’s 2022 report found that there were 185,000 re-registrations of the births of children born out of wedlock in England and Wales between 1949-73, which it said was the closest estimate it could find.
Source: Community Care
