Adoption and NLP expert Helen Oakwater’s new book, Bubble Wrapped Children, released this week, has generated a worldwide storm lifting the lid on a major crisis within adoption.

Reuters, The Times (in a front page article), The Sun, The Australian, The Daily Mail are among dozens of major media outlets that carried features on Thursday and Friday.

Helen also appeared on SKY News and ITV’s Daybreak interviews.

Here is the SKY News interview.

http://video.sky.com/embed/external/16143245

Below is an extract the article from Reuters.

Reuters – LONDON | Thu Jan 5, 2012.

“British youngsters adopted after abusive childhoods are at risk of fresh emotional turmoil as some birth parents turn to Facebook and other social networking sites to track them down, adoption agencies said on Thursday. The ease with which birth parents can use technology to get in touch with their children without warning and without following established safeguards has alarmed adoption agencies.

Families who have been contacted have described the experience as like being in a “slow motion car crash” leaving them “battered and bruised.” Some families have been torn apart. “Social networking sites have blown things open — you can’t keep things secret,” said Julia Feast, consultant at the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF), which campaigns for children in care.

“It really unsettles the whole family,” she told Reuters. “It’s like a bomb being thrown inside it and you don’t know how you are going to pull the pieces together again if children are not being prepared.”

Under British law, birth parents cannot access the adoption records of their children and usually, in the days before social networking, it was very difficult for them to make contact.

Since 2005, adopted adults and their birth relatives have had the legal right to ask for intermediary services from an approved agency to help them make contact with each other, but this can be turned down if there are concerns following an assessment.

It is not known how many birth parents are using social networking sites to get around this, but the BAAF said it was receiving “more and more cases.”

The full article is available on Reuters Website.

Bubble Wrapped Children is available from all good bookshops including Barnes and Noble USA and Amazon UK, and in most electronic formats including Amazon Kindle.