If you care about kids, give us all the facts

News programmes are as interesting, these days, for what they don’t tell you as for what they do. So, the ten o’clock news on the BBC on Monday night reported the horrible murder of 18-month-old Elsie Scully-Hicks by her adoptive father, without mentioning that the baby had been adopted by a gay couple. There was a fleeting reference to the murderer, Matthew Scully-Hicks, having a husband, which kind of gave the game away. But otherwise it was something the BBC would rather we did not know, and certainly did not dwell on.

Whenever they do something like this, I think it’s important to dwell on it for a bit. There are lots of things they don’t tell you, these days. When someone does a spot of ad hoc alfresco murdering, they won’t tell you his race unless he’s white. They won’t tell you his religion unless he’s not Muslim. If he is Muslim, his belief system will have been exonerated, or considered irrelevant, by the BBC. If he is a white fascist, however, his belief system will be held almost entirely responsible for the crime. This, I would argue, is stupid as well as inconsistent.

On the gay thing, the BBC clearly made a corporate decision that Scully-Hicks’s sexual orientation was of no relevance, and therefore it wouldn’t be mentioned. That is a bit of a leap, to say the least, since gay people have been allowed to adopt children for only 15 years, the public is still marginally agin the idea and the research on outcomes for adoptees of gay parents is both sketchy and full of the usual wishful thinking: i.e., it’s usually anecdotal or made up.

Adoptive parents of any sexual orientation are much, much more likely to harm their children than are genetic parents. The figure is even worse for step-parents — something the evolutionary psychologists call the ‘Cinderella Effect’ (basically, step-parents, like adoptive parents, have no genetic investment in their kids, so the theory goes).