Some of the arguments most commonly used against lesbians or gay men as potential foster or adoptive carers are constructed in the form of notions of ‘risk’ posed to children (Hicks 1997). These are most frequently:
• the ‘double burden’ argument - the idea that children being placed in
substitute care have enough to cope with, either from their previous
experiences of abuse or in coming to terms with being fostered or adopted, so that to place them with carers who are ‘different’ because of their lesbian or gay sexuality creates a double burden for the child.
• the teasing argument - the idea that children who are placed with lesbians or
gay men will be mercilessly teased at school and suffer poor and damaged interactions with their peer groups. This is the idea that children will suffer stigma by proxy due to living with lesbian or gay parents.
• the abnormal gender role models argument - the idea that children need
and learn gender role models from their parents, and so they should have a male and a female parent if they are to develop a healthy gender identity in the future. This is the idea that lesbians and gay men cannot provide balanced gender role models, or that the role models they provide are distorted.
• the corruption argument - the idea that children will suffer by association
with lesbians and gay men. This argument suggests that such children will themselves become gay by force of example, or that they will be corrupted into the ways of gay sex (including being sexually abused) by lesbian or gay
carers.
• the ‘pawns of the gay rights lobby’ argument - the idea that lesbians and
gay men are not really interested in parenting or helping children, and that they are just using children to make a political point for gay rights and equality with heterosexuals. This argument suggests that lesbians and gay men apply to foster or adopt just to prove a point, and that they are promoting the gay (adults’) rights agenda at the expense of children’s needs.
I wanted to examine these arguments as a part of my research because I was interested in how the social workers made sense of them, whether they had heard them, how they used them, or how they might counter them. Certainly I found they were key themes in all the interviews, and were therefore central to how the social workers made sense of ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’. These arguments are commonly reviewed in writings on lesbian and gay parenting (Martin 1993; Ricketts 1991; Saffron 1996) but are often referred to as ‘myths’ or ‘stereotypes’ about lesbians and gay men (Benkov 1994:58; Rights of Women Lesbian
Custody Group 1986:125; Skeates & Jabri 1988:17).
Skeates & Jabri (1988), for example, have the following to say about what they term “misrepresentations and untruths” (1988:23):
[T]his hostility...amounts to no more than a belief system wholly based on a false set of assumptions about lesbians and gay men
and their lifestyles. These assumptions themselves stem from the incorporation of a large number of myths and stereotypes about lesbians and gay men...However, the most damaging of these myths and stereotypes are those whose effect is to throw serious doubt on the desirability of allowing lesbians and gay men to be in close contact with children and young people.
(Skeates & Jabri 1988:18).
I believe that use of the word ‘myth’, however, is unhelpful here for understanding how the social workers used what I have preferred to term ‘risk-based’
arguments. ‘Myth’ tends to suggest a pre-existing set of beliefs to which the social workers had access, as in “...myth n. (primitive) tale embodying esp.
ancient popular belief or idea” (Oxford Dictionary). This suggests a passive
model of the construction of ideas in which such pre-existing ‘myths’ are ‘pulled off the shelf’ at will by social workers; or it suggests that ‘myths’ take the role of a dominant ideology of which the social workers are the passive dupes. Instead, my argument is that some of the social workers did use risk-based arguments, certainly all of them referred to them, but that these are actively constructed
versions of the categories ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’. The social workers, if they so wished,
made arguments about the risks posed to children by lesbians and gay men that were specific to fostering and adoption, but this was an active process which involved their discursively representing lesbians and gay men as ‘dangerous’, for example.
Thus I argue that this is the construction of social work discourse (Parton & Marshall 1998; Philp 1979; Rojek et al. 1988) concerning ‘lesbians’, ‘gay men’ and the notion of the ‘good enough carer of children’, ‘discourse’ being:-
...not a disembodied collection of statements, but groupings of utterances or sentences, statements which are enacted within a social context, which are determined by that social context and which contribute to the way that social context continues its existence. Institutions and social context therefore play an
important determining role in the development, maintenance and circulation of discourses. (Mills 1997:11).
The point that I wish to make here is, then, that a discourse serves regulatory purposes, thus having concrete effects in everyday social work practice:
...discourse is not just speech; it is embedded in a historical and cultural context and expressed often in the frame of a scenario or cultural performance. It is about practice...Insofar as the
discourse evolves it begins to effect the practice. (Obeyesekere
1992:650, quoted in Loomba 1998:103).
stigma is a particular view of sexuality and one which, I think, concomitantly stigmatizes. It also has the effect of requiring social workers to spend efforts and time convincing others (e.g. panels, courts) of the quite ridiculous notion that the children of lesbians and gay men will never suffer any teasing ever, something which cannot really possibly be true of any child anywhere. Further, it serves the regulatory function of ensuring that only those lesbian and gay applicants who can demonstrate the ability to deal with such potential teasing will be approved. Of itself this is no bad thing, but what such a version does not address is the source of such teasing in the first place, that is a heterosexuality which claims that lesbians and gay men are immoral, abnormal or whatever.
This example begins to demonstrate why simply ‘opposing’ risk-based arguments with the assertion that ‘they are not true’ becomes meaningless. Instead I argue that it is impossible to say that all children who have lesbian or gay parents will never be teased, it is quite possible that some of them will grow up to be lesbian or gay, it is possible that they may develop critical attitudes about traditional gender roles and may demonstrate non-traditional gender role behaviour. It is also possible that some children will find the idea of living with lesbian or gay carers simply too shameful, and it cannot be said that all men and women who go under the categories ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ are constitutionally incapable of ever abusing power and/or abusing children.
their discursive construction and in their practice effects, divert attention away from heterosexuality. For example, it could as easily be argued that most children being placed in substitute care have been formerly ‘victimized’ in heterosexual households (usually by men), that heterosexuality continues to exert prejudice, and physical and emotional violences, against lesbians and gay men, that children who do not exhibit ‘correct’ gender behaviour also suffer such
opprobrium, that young lesbians and gay men suffer greatly as a consequence, or indeed that the vast numbers of children who do not live in heterosexual two- parent families are similarly disadvantaged.
The social workers rarely made such arguments, however, because, even where they opposed the notion that the children of lesbians and gay men were ‘at risk’, they nevertheless were constrained to represent lesbian and gay applicants to fostering or adoption panels in ways which did address these arguments. For example, some of the social workers told me that they did not have concerns about the gender role models presented by lesbians and gay men, yet they also said that they would have to address this concern because panels would raise it. I have also developed this argument in chapter six with regard to the panel- driven nature of Nita and Clare’s assessment.
‘The Everyday World As Problematic’, or Problematizing ‘Common Sense’
knowledge-claims by focusing on social work practice as an ‘everyday world’ which should be ‘made problematic’, in Dorothy Smith’s words (Smith 1987). Smith argues that a feminist sociology should begin its analysis not within discourse, which she defines as abstracted and textually mediated social
relations, but within our daily, local worlds (Smith 1987:98). This problematization of ‘the everyday world’ aims to make visible these social relations, or the
‘relations of ruling’ by which it is organized (Smith 1987:88). It is exactly this which interests me here in terms of analyzing the ‘relations of ruling’ that
structure what are in fact ‘everyday’ arguments about the children of lesbians and gay men.
Such risk-based arguments are ‘everyday’ in the sense that they are the regular stuff of television talk-shows, press reports, radio phone-ins, discussions in pubs or on street corners, or indeed within universities, about lesbian and gay
parenting generally (see for example BBC ‘Esther’ 1996; BBC Radio 4 1994; Brennan 1994; McRobbie 1991; Powell 1998; Weese & Wolff 1995). They are ‘common sense’ arguments, well known to, and well used by, the social workers. Nevertheless, as Smith argues, an amount of work is required to constitute such arguments as ‘norms’ (Smith 1987:155), and it is the heterosexual relations of ruling which structure the social accomplishment of these as ‘knowledge’ about lesbian and gay parents.
practices which construct the world “as texts” (Smith 1987:3) but that this takes place within existing ‘relations of ruling’, which are:
a complex of organized practices...as well as the discourses in texts that interpenetrate the multiple sites of power. A mode of ruling has become dominant that involves a continual
transcription of the local and particular actualities of our lives into abstracted and generalized forms...Forms of consciousness are created that are the properties of organization or discourse rather
than of individual subjects. (Smith 1987:3).
I think that this notion of the relations of ruling is helpful for understanding why the social workers felt largely constrained to address risk-based arguments about lesbian and gay applicants, even where they did not support such arguments themselves. Fostering and adoption assessments are “a complex of organized
practices” (Smith 1987:3) which constitute the world ‘as texts’ via discursive and
written representations, or via talk and text. The social workers regularly talked about the expectations demanded of such work by panels, for example. We can see these expectations, therefore, as revolving around ‘norms’ of gender and sexuality, and relatedly, panels, assessment reports, assessment interviews, and so on as practices which are constituted by heterosexual relations of ruling. Fostering and adoption, I suggest, are governed not only by Smith’s relations of ruling which exclude women’s ways of seeing, but also by those which prioritize
and shore up things heterosexual. Men’s versions of the world, and heterosexual versions of the world, are portrayed as neutral knowledge, as the ‘norm’ (Smith 1987:19). It will become clear in chapter five that I see the social workers’
anxieties about gender and sexuality as closely entwined, and so I see no reason to remove the specificity of Smith’s arguments about gender here.
Thus the everyday world for the social workers here is a heteronormative one, one in which prevailing discourses concerning sexuality legitimate what is
desirable, undesirable, acceptable and unacceptable (Bristow 1997:170). These also legitimate what can and cannot be said about the categories ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’, and that is why the social workers were constrained to represent versions of these categories which addressed the risk-based arguments. Such was the force of the heteronormative social work discourse of ‘the good carer’ here.
The ‘double burden’ argument was used by those social workers who were the least happy about lesbians and gay men as carers:
But it’s not the sexuality that’s important is it? It’s what the sexuality may or may not do to the child, how it affects the child. Children being placed with foster parents are traumatized
anyway by definition and I think we also know that children have a horror of being different...different from the gang, different from the group. So what we’re looking at is traumatized children, and
traumatizing them again because they haven’t got a mother and a father is reinforcing difference. It needs a child who is quite strong and stable and secure in him or herself to be able to cope with being different and our children who come into care don’t
have that inner stability and security. [Social Worker, SR1].
Here the social worker constructs an argument with a child ‘at risk’ at the centre. Lesbians and gay men are represented as the source of (additional) trauma because their sexuality is seen as ‘difference’. Cathy also argued that having lesbian or gay carers would be “something extra that the child is going to have to
come to terms with...and you don’t want to add any extra difficulties...” [Social
Worker, SR5]. However, others did not accept the ‘double burden’ argument. Maude, for example, pointed out that it was not long ago that black families were often seen as dysfunctional by social work agencies, and she drew a parallel with lesbians and gay men to argue against any difference from the white
heterosexual standard being seen as ‘abnormal’.
Still others took a middle-ground option, in which they argued that some children would not cope with lesbian or gay parents, particularly those who craved
‘normality’ and ‘wanting to be like everyone else’:
I do have some sympathy with this argument and that is because some kids do find giving explanations about their position as
fostered quite hard, and I’m aware that the children of lesbians and gay men are often quite troubled by that as well, you know having to tell their mates... [Social Worker, NE7].
The ‘middle-grounders’ took two positions from this; either that the ‘double burden’ was strong enough to argue that lesbian and gay carers were always inappropriate for some children, or that this could be worked through as long as carers were able to handle such issues with the child in question.
I found contradictory views concerning the age at which it would be appropriate to place children with lesbians or gay men, and this related directly to the notion of ‘double burden’. Some of the social workers felt that it was more appropriate for older children to be placed with gay carers, but this was sometimes because they felt that older children were less ‘corruptible.’ Wayne, for instance, argued that older children would have already formed a view of gender roles and sexual relationships, so would be less likely to take on the role models provided by lesbian or gay carers. Others, like Liz, felt that children over eleven were more likely to cope with the ‘difference’ of having lesbian or gay parents, or would be better at giving explanations of their situation to peers. The reverse of this argument was to make the point that younger children are not so ‘corruptible’ because they understand less about issues of sexuality, or that they would cope better with lesbian or gay carers because they would not be aware of this, a similar argument applied to the placing of disabled children with lesbians and gay