Matching, Ethnicity and Identity. Reflections on the practice and realities of ethnic matching in adoption.

Ethnicity and adoption have taken centre stage in the Coalition Government's focus on child care social policy in the UK. The current political perspective is one of promoting the placement of children of minority ethnic heritage with white families, in order to avoid delay in adoption where no families of a similar ethnic heritage are available. John Wainwright and Julie Ridley reflect on the contemporary debate by discussing the findings from a commissioned service evaluation of an adoption agency that specialised in recruiting families of black, Asian and dual heritage, and placing children of black and minority ethnic (BME) heritage. This service evaluation provides evidence that focusing on recruiting BME individuals and families and matching them with children of similar heritage can be effective. The evaluation utilised mixed methods, including interviews with staff in the service, prospective and current adopters, and statistical information that informed an understanding of the type of ethnic matches made. Comparison was also made with a general adoption service within the commissioning agency using the same data collection methods

Themes, Issues and Practice Dilemmas in Ethnically Matched Adoption Placements

The issue of ethnicity and adoption in children’s social work services is a controversial and complex area of child care practice. Ethnic matching has been regarded as a successful way to place children and provide BME (Black and minority ethnic) children with a stable and settled placement. Crucially, it is argued that ethnically matched placements encourage and nurture a positive black identity within BME children, which is perceived as central to their well-being. Using the findings from a service evaluation in the UK, this paper explores themes and issues, as well as policy, and practice dilemmas inherent in the practice of ethnic matching in adoption. Research has rarely examined this process in any depth, nor has it prioritised the views and experiences of adopters from BME communities. The field is dominated by the discourse surrounding trans ethnic adoption (the placement of BME children with white adopters). Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to evaluate practice in a specialist BME adoption service and to compare this to a mainstream adoption service within the same organisation. Results indicated the specialist focus was important. However, it also posed conceptual and practice dilemmas. The increasingly complex nature of ethnicity in modern society underlines the importance of services engaging directly with the challenging fluidity of ethnic and cultural identity

Randomized Smoothing for Stochastic Optimization

We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures, both in expectation and with high probability, that have optimal dependence on the variance of the gradient estimates. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first variance-based rates for non-smooth optimization. We give several applications of our results to statistical estimation problems, and provide experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. We also describe how a combination of our algorithm with recent work on decentralized optimization yields a distributed stochastic optimization algorithm that is order-optimal.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure

Black Boys’ and Young Men’s Experiences with Criminal Justice and Desistance in England and Wales: A Literature Review

Black boys and young men are over-represented across the youth and adult justice systems in England and Wales. Despite the Lammy Review (2017) into the treatment of, and outcomes for Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System, the disproportionate numbers of black boys and young men at all stages of the system continues to rise. There has been limited qualitative research of black boys’ and young men’s experiences of the justice system in England and Wales. In particular, there is a lack of evidence on their experiences of sentencing and courts. What is known tends to focus on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic and/or Muslim men’s experiences more generally. A lack of critical understanding of the specific experiences of desistance by young black men has been criticised in the literature. Set in this context, this review of UK literature focuses on the following questions: (1) what are black boys and young black men’s experiences of the youth and criminal justice systems in England? and (2) what does research tell us specifically about their experiences of desistance

The Barometer of My Heart Visual Matrix Research and Evaluation project

This report is the outcome of an in-depth study of audience reception of an artwork which itself involved years of in-depth inquiry and prolonged collaboration between artist, Mark Storor, and consultant endocrinologist, Dr Leighton Seal. The work was produced by Anna Ledgard in association with Artsadmin and was supported by a Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award and the Arts Council England. The Barometer of My Heart is an exploration through visual art and performance of men’s experiences of erectile dysfunction and impotence. In the popular imagination there is often a simple equation between the two that belies their complexity and diversity. Depending on circumstance and perspective, erectile dysfunction may be perceived as an issue related primarily to health, to intimate sexual relationships to performance in other spheres of life, to male identities or to the condition of masculinity in late modernity. It follows that although erectile dysfunction and impotence are related, they are not co-extensive. The former can be thought of as a bio-medical condition that afflicts individual men and has a wide range of physical and psychological correlates. It may be a symptom of a serious underlying health condition that demands assessment and interventi on– the title of the work draws attention to erectile dysfunction as an early warning of developing heart disease. However impotence is also existential, psychosocial and societal in its ramifications. In the performative cultures of contemporary western societies it signifies powerlessness, loss of agency and a failure to play one’s part. As such it is a challenge for men and women alike. The Barometer of my Heart arose in part from the wall of public silence and private despair that surrounds these issues – only too often met with incomprehension and fear. In the absence of public health education, erectile dysfunction attracts negative projections that may or may not be internalised. Men may delay seeking help with potential deadly consequences1. Impotence can be regarded as something to be worked through with professional healthcare and supportive relationships or it may be experienced as a source of shame and a psychosocial catastrophe. What then are the conditions for compassionate understanding and an enlightened public conversation? The Barometer of My Heart uses visual, acoustic and digital media in a performance to communicate matters that all too often have been shrouded in secrecy. It does this through a process of artistic enactment and symbolization rather than representation – in other words it presents its audiences with forms for the inchoate and unspoken feelings that the subject arouses. The audiences in our study made use of these cultural forms, mingling them with personal life experiences. We expected that their engagement would be accompanied by anxiety, fear, desire and perhaps hope –and that the scenes of the show would create a ‘third space’ where unacknowledged and unrecognized emotions could find expression and emerge into consciousness, perhaps for the first time. We had reason to believe that interviews or focus groups, relying on participants’ verbal accounts of experience, would fail to capture this emergent process. For this reason we used a recently developed group based method – the visual matrix2 – that gives expression through imagery and affect to what is ‘known’ but as yet ‘unthought’.3 When we began this study the method had already been used to assess civic engagement with public art, but not in such an intimate and private area of experience.4 Whereas our primary aim has been to understand and account for audience engagement with The Barometer of My Heart, a secondary aim has been to determine whether the visual matrix is a suitable method to study an artwork that deals with a subject that is hard to think about, hard to speak of and very often hard to bear

Youth Justice, Black Children and Young Men in Liverpool: A Story of Rac(ism), Identity and Contested Spaces

This study explores the experiences of the black children and young men that attended a Youth Offending Team (YOT) in Liverpool, a city in the North of England, UK. It focuses on the perspectives of both the YOT practitioners and the black children/young men as they develop working relationships with each other. Through this two-way prism the back children/young men reflect on what is important to them before and after they enter the criminal justice system. Likewise, the YOT practitioners provide their understanding of the key issues in the young people’s lives—in particular, how the black children/young men made sense of their lives in Liverpool with a particular identity with place, space, class and race. A genealogy of race/class prism, along with an intersectional and appreciative inquiry methodology, was employed that encouraged the youth justice workers and young black men to explore the strengths and realities of their lives. Focus groups were undertaken with seven YOT practitioners and managers, along with semi-structured interviews with five black children/young men. The methodology focused on points of intersection of power, difference and identity. Findings that emerged from the participants included the experience of racism within the criminal justice system, the community and the wider city, along with the importance of education, employment and relations with the young people’s family. A core theme was an identity of black children/young men from a specific region. This intersection was as Scousers, black boys/young men, the contestation over space and their negotiated identity regarding race. The ambivalence and (un)certainty that these identities evoked provide possibilities for youth justice practitioners engaging with young black men involved in serious and repeat offending