Adoption’s need for ‘villains’: folklore, [legal] fictions, and Northern Ireland’s proposals for redress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adoption lore (found in its laws, policies, and jurisliterature, for example) often seems to demand - or indeed conjure - the presence of a villainous other. Archaic beliefs and customs have long sought to vilify the various participants in adoption processes, legal and de facto: adoptees and foundlings may be depicted as 'demon seeds' or suspect, abhuman changelings, ‘relinquishing’ parents may be framed as indifferent or feckless abandoners, while the ‘wicked stepmother’ trope continues to predominate in folk and faery tales, and in popular culture. More recently, the decision-makers behind a century of forced adoption practices (human, church, state) have gradually been identified as particularly culpable, in several jurisdictions where truth recovery or redress mechanisms are slowly grinding to a conclusion (e.g. Ireland, Australia, Canada, England and Wales) or indeed struggling to get fully off the ground (Northern Ireland, Korea). The ‘shapeshifting’ nature of the villainous other’s role and identity merits analysis, given its ability to influence public opinion and cause mini moral panics. I argue here that Northern Ireland’s current Consultation on the need for a Public Inquiry (and redress scheme) for the victims and survivors of mother baby institutions (and Magdalen Laundries, and potentially, workhouses) contains clear and subtle echoes of some of the more concerning traditions and tropes on forced relinquishment. Its emphasis, for example, on the stigmatising need to maintain secrecies and protect property interests (inheritances of potential awards, preservation of public funds) may prove particularly triggering for older adoptees long-affected by brick-walled searches for identity and ancestors, reunion refusals, informational vetoes, or advice on the need for rescue-gratitude and deferential behaviours.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".