For much of our lives, adoptees were largely absent from formal justice and accountability processes — not because harm had not occurred, but because adoption itself was treated as resolution.

Over time, that began to change.

As reviews and inquiries into care, abuse, and state responsibility emerged across Scotland and the UK, adoptees started reaching out to one another. Connections formed through shared experience, independent research, survivor networks, and long-standing informal work that had often gone unseen.

Many adoptees engaged in good faith across these processes, often at the same time.

Some engaged with the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, where adoption-related harm sat uneasily at the edges of a system designed around institutions rather than lifelong legal severance.

Others engaged with UK processes that followed the UK Apology for Child Migration, where forced separation was acknowledged as a historic wrong, yet adoption — another form of permanent separation — remained largely unexamined.

In Scotland, adoptees engaged with the Independent Care Review and the commitments that followed through The Promise, sharing lived experience, evidence, and insight in the hope that adoption would finally be understood as a lifelong legal status, not simply a childhood outcome.

At a UK level, adoptees also intersected with parliamentary and human rights processes, including work connected to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, where frameworks for addressing historic abuse and apology were being considered — again without a clear place for adopted adults as autonomous rights-holders.

Across these different reviews, inquiries, and processes, a pattern became increasingly clear.

Adoptees were present.
Adoptees contributed evidence.
But adoptees were not recognised as rights-holders in their own right.

This was not a single omission. It was repeated, structural, and consistent.

In response, adoptees began working collectively. Lived experience, research, documentation, and legal understanding were brought together to produce a set of formal recommendations for government. These became the SAAM 2023 Recommendations and Core Circumstances, setting out the rights adoptees should have over identity, history, and lifelong legal status.

Those recommendations were shared with both the Scottish and UK Governments. They became the foundation of what is now the Adoptee Rights UK campaign.

Our position was — and remains — clear:
our lives did not end with adoption, and our rights should not either.